The newest PlayStation-published live-service shooter, Harmony, has officially launched, with early numbers indicating a potentially explosive start.
While concurrent player counts may not hold equal importance for single-player video games, they take on a different significance in the context of live-service titles. Valve’s newly announced hero shooter, Impasse, has achieved impressive numbers just days after its formal reveal, with SteamDB reporting a concurrent player count peak of 89,000 – an astonishing figure for a game still months away from release. Although Harmony has been available to play for a brief period, its official launch occurred this weekend, provided one had received an invitation. According to Steam data, the game’s initial performance was underwhelming, with a maximum concurrent player count of merely 697 gamers on its launch day.
Despite expectations that numbers would improve over the weekend as more gamers logged in to try it out, a disappointing trend emerged: Saturday’s performance actually worsened compared to Friday, and Sunday followed suit by doing even worse than Saturday. That Friday launch can also be fairly upsetting for another reason: it’s smaller than last year’s absolute disaster, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which peaked at just 758 players – a figure it reached upon launch and never surpassed.
That’s a stark rebuke to Harmony, a high-end live-service game launching during a time when similar experiences are freely available to many players, suggesting a significant mismatch between the product’s value proposition and market expectations. While this analysis may not fully consider the demographic differences between PlayStation and other platforms, the fact remains unsettling. As concerns about the virus continue to mount, we must ask: will this trend dissipate, or will it persist in some form?
In January 2024, Sony’s Sherif reiterated his concerns about the viability of PlayStation’s long-promised live-service model, wondering aloud if anyone would ultimately be invested in the outcome. While Helldivers 2’s success was certainly boosted by word-of-mouth, Harmony may struggle to replicate this phenomenon regardless of its quality.
While there’s an issue, Fran’s 3/5-star review also raises concerns: he deemed the sport “shooter design by committee,” fostering little to no confidence whatsoever.
Wouldn’t it be fascinating to learn which sport emerged eight years ago? As the gaming industry continues to evolve, the success of Overwatch further underscores the significance of live-service models in delivering engaging and dynamic player experiences? Now, we must wait and observe whether PlayStation will continue to drift further away from its live-service model – it has already done so last year, delaying six titles and canceling another at the end of 2023 as well. As enthusiasts clamour for new experiences, it’s high time for PlayStation to revive its legacy of delivering engaging, large-scale, first-party, single-player games featuring innovative intellectual properties. Let’s raise a glass to Harmony in the interim, then.
