Nobody wanted these PS5 Concord drives until Sony stopped making them

Just a week ago, a new disc copy of Sony's team-based shooter surfaced. Concord On the PlayStation 5, the price would be around $40 at most retailers. Now that Sony has shut down the game's servers after just two weeks, you'd think those now-useless discs would be practically worthless.

Instead, the physical version of Concord The PS5’s selling price has become a surprise collector’s item. An Ars analysis of nearly 300 eBay listings completed between September 3 and September 8 shows that new copies of the now-defunct game sold for an average price of $100 since the game’s shutdown. That current price peaked at $118 on September 5, up from $89.50 on September 3, before settling at $110 for eBay sales completed on September 8.

Supply and demand

As is usual with gaming collectibles, the price increase has less to do with gameplay and more to do with rarity. GameDiscoverCo analyst Simon Carless told Agency last month that he was estimating disappointing total sales of 25,000 units for Concord on PS5 and PC. Even if we assume that 80 percent of those sales were on PS5, the majority of those console sales likely occurred as purely digital downloads, given longstanding industry trends and the game’s focus on online play.

That means the total number of PS5 Concord The discs in circulation could reach into the single-digit thousands, making it easily one of the rarest first-party physical games Sony has ever released. And with Sony officially stopping Concord If we take into account sales from September 3, that figure is not going to increase any time soon.

Sony encouraged players who purchased a physical copy of Concord “Check the refund process at the retailer you purchased it from to get your refund.” However, gamers who followed that advice missed out on the chance to quickly recoup their investment by reselling on eBay. A pair of lucky eBay sellers even netted nearly $500 for sealed copies of the game sold on September 5.

Yet even without those sorts of one-off cases, most eBay sellers have been able to get between $87 (20th percentile) and $120 (80th percentile) for new disc copies of the game since it was discontinued. That's an easy 100 to 200 percent return on a $40 investment in less than a month. And photos from some of those eBay listings suggest that some sellers were looking to cash in by reselling dozens of copies in individual batches.

The collector's mania for Concord The trend has apparently extended to a limited-edition controller that Sony was selling for $85. Full-size eBay listings for that controller had an average price of $252.50 on Sept. 8, up from $132 on Sept. 3. Unlike the game they’re based on, however, those controllers have the advantage of continuing to work with PS5 hardware in the future.

At the moment, it's difficult to predict how long these price trends will last. If there is a broader market of PlayStation collectors looking for a rare piece of Sony history, Concord It could become the modern equivalent of the NES. Events at the stadium—a rare but forgettable game that collectors still prize. But if speculators are driving the current mania, hoping to quickly resell it for more money to the next person in line, the price bubble could burst as quickly as it inflated.

All that speculation could also collapse if Sony decides to relaunch Concord sales in the future. In announcing the game's closure, Sony said it was “exploring”[ing] “There are many options, including ones that will best reach our players.” There is already a tongue-in-cheek petition to convince Sony to do exactly that, with nearly 2,000 signatories. “We were all busy that week,” the petition title reads. “Please release Concord again.”

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