The newest PlayStation-published live-service shooter Harmony is right here, and launch numbers are wanting fairly unhealthy to date.
In relation to concurrent participant counts, numbers do not all the time matter, notably for single-player video games, however live-service titles are a special story. Valve’s new hero shooter Impasse, which it lastly formally revealed final week, had a concurrent participant depend peak of 89,000 simply yesterday, in keeping with SteamDB, a really spectacular determine for a recreation that is not even out but. Nonetheless, whereas it has been playable for a short while now, so long as you’ve got bought an invitation, this weekend did have an precise launch for an additional live-service hero shooter, Harmony. Besides, its Steam numbers are usually not doing so good, amassing solely 697 gamers at one time on the sport’s launch day.
Numbers simply bought worse over the weekend, whenever you’d anticipate extra gamers to login to test it out, however nope, Saturday was worse than Friday, and Sunday worse than Saturday. That Friday launch determine can also be fairly upsetting for an additional motive: it is smaller than final 12 months’s absolute trainwreck, and studio ruining, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which has a peak of 758 gamers (which it acquired when it launched and subsequently by no means topped).
That is clearly a giant, inadvertent indictment of Harmony, a premium live-service title releasing in an period when that kind of recreation is so generally free. This clearly does not account for PlayStation’s participant depend, which is presumably increased contemplating this can be a PlayStation-published title, nevertheless it’s nonetheless not a superb signal. So the place does this depart Sony?
As Sherif wrote about again in January, 2024 is lastly the 12 months that PlayStation is delivering on its live-service promise, however questioned whether or not anybody will care. They definitely did with the massively profitable Helldivers 2, though that undoubtedly acquired a lift via phrase of mouth, one thing Harmony doubtless will not get, irrespective of how good it may be.
There’s an issue there too, as Fran gave the sport 3/5 stars in his assessment, saying it is just about “shooter design by committee”, which does not encourage confidence within the slightest.
It does not assist that Harmony had a growth time of eight years (what recreation got here out eight years in the past? Overwatch), so total this simply highlights how a lot of a threat live-service is. Now we simply have to attend and see if PlayStation pulls again even farther from live-service – it already did final 12 months, provided that it delayed six of them, and certainly one of its attainable largest was simply outright cancelled on the finish of 2023 too. If you happen to ask me, it is time for PlayStation to get again on the massive, first-party, single-player practice with some contemporary IP. Perhaps we should always simply pour one out for Harmony within the meantime.
