IP Supremacy vs. Longevity: How Copyright Claims, Like the Concord Takedown, Kill the Spirit of Esports

Intellectual Property (IP) Supremacy i.e. the rigid assertion and enforcement of Copyright Claims, has become a game executioner, demonstrating how easily a publisher’s legal notice can instantly destroy the longevity and spirit of esports and the gaming industry that communities fight so hard to preserve.

This article will explore the recent case regarding Sony’s Concord and other similar past cases, and how they demonstrate that publisher’s enforcement of IP rights are often contradictory with the pillars that make up the gaming industry: passion and nostalgia.

Concord: The Initial Failure and the Attempted Revival

On 6 September 2024, Concord, a game developed by Sony’s Firewalk Studios, shut down just two weeks after its initial launch. For a game that took eight years to develop, the speed and suddenness of its shutdown is almost unheard of.¹  

There are multiple potential reasons why the game failed to that extent: high price, inability to compete with games like Overwatch and Valorant, no sufficient marketing, etc.²  In PC Gamer’s review of the game, awarding it just 45%, they wrote: “it really didn’t offer anything that made it stand out from the crowd”.³ Following this shockingly rapid flameout, Sony also decided to dismantle Firewalk Studios just a few short months later.

Whilst the game was not perceived greatly by consumers, it nevertheless had some fans who did not want to see it go. Three of these fans are modders known as Red, open_wizard, and gwog.⁴ These modders decided to launch a project to reverse engineer Concord and thereby develop a new version of the game running on their own custom servers. 

The project was coming along well, and whilst the game was not perfect, the modders released gameplay videos on YouTube showing it was functional, and actually resembled the original version. Eventually, full matches were playable on customer servers.⁵

Aware of potential legal trouble, the modders wanted to keep their revival of the game aligned with the law to the best of their ability. The team wrote on their dedicated discord channel:

‘I know this sucks for people who got forcefully refunded, but lawyers are most likely already watching everything we do and I want to ensure this project stays as legal as we realistically can do’.⁶ 

They made clear that no piracy will be tolerated, promised to remove any posts containing copyrighted files, and only hosted players who already owned the game files themselves i.e. people who purchased Concord before its initial shut down.⁷

Even with all the precautions being taken, Sony still decided to file a copyright infringement claim (DMCA notice) against the videos of the fan project uploaded on YouTube and other social media channels. Consequently, it seems the project has been paused for the moment, as the modders wrote on their Discord channel: ‘Due to worrying legal action we’ve decided to pause invites for the time being’, essentially meaning that unless an agreement is reached with Sony, the project has been shut down.⁸ Thus, whilst it is unclear whether a DMCA notice was filed on the project entirely, the notice on the videos was enough to deter the fans longing for their favorite game to return.

The Legal Issue

The takedown of fan projects trying to ‘revive’ the games they loved by companies like Sony is not new. BloodbornePSX demake, for example, was another widely anticipated demake of the popular game Bloodborne that was shut down by Sony via DMCA notices.⁹ A DMCA notice and takedown is a tool for copyright holders to take down any material that infringes their copyrights off of the internet.¹⁰ 

Situations like with Concord and BloodbornePSX raise a lot of questions regarding the intersection of IP rights with consumer rights and expectations of ownership. Especially, within the DMCA, there is a tool called the Digital Rights Management (DRM), which prevents the use of software, music, video, text, or other media, without an approval from the original publisher.¹¹ This tool, as argued by many gaming enthusiasts, hurts the gaming industry at its very core. 

As Kenneth Poirier, a gaming blogger, puts it, the tool

‘means hassle, aggravation, invasion of privacy, and annoyance to the consumers of video games’.¹²

What Poirier argues is that the DRM puts publishers in all-encompassing control of the product they are selling, with no limits to what they can do. Whilst the consumer may think they purchased a product and are thus the owners of it, the publisher is free to take actions like discontinuing it, and the consumer has no choice but to simply accept it.¹³   

This is demonstrated with situations like Concord, where players have purchased the game and can simply no longer use it. In that situation, even though the modders have limited the revived version only to consumers who initially purchased the game, and therefore should have access to the game, Sony has nevertheless used their IP rights and DRM authority to issue a DMCA notice and there is very little the consumers can do about it.  Arguably, Sony’s right to control superseded the customer’s right to use. 

Rick Lane of PC Gamer has also commented on the manner publishers use their IP rights to take down fan-created revivals and demakes of games, acknowledging their rights to protect the copyrighted works but arguing that their approach to enforcement ‘seems extremely heavy-handed’, stating that he believes publishers should service their audience more rather than ‘clamping down on these frankly harmless fan projects’.¹⁴ 

IP has, in general, been highly criticised in the video games industry for stifling innovation and suffocating competition, as one user on Reddit stated: ‘There shouldn’t be patents in video games at all. No more locking down basic mechanics like “catching monsters” or “survival horror inventory systems.” All it does is create monopolies where devs don’t have to innovate, they just sue anyone who tries to do it better… Copyright should protect actual stolen assets (like straight up copied models or music), not ideas. Let devs build on each other’s work’.¹⁵ 

In that regard, Sony itself has often enforced its IP rights for game components which the reddit user above may vehmently disagree are protectable. For example, Sony has recently filed suit against Tencent Holdings and affiliated companies, alleging copyright infringement and trade mark infringement over, inter alia, a character’s features (red hair, tribal-style clothing, etc.). This demonstrates how even a character’s looks can be legally protected, which begs the question: have game publishers and developers taken IP enforcment too far?

Takeaways

The gaming industry is one that requires longevity to survive.¹⁶ Fan revivals, like the one for Concord, are built on what makes the gaming industry special: passion. Consumers keep buying new games and yet going back to old favorites due to nostalgia and passion, two tenets of the gaming industry, without which the industry may collapse. IP rights and the way they are utilised in the gaming industry destroys the very roots of the gaming industry, as they seemingly reinforce the consumer sentiment that publishers are driven by immediate profit maximisation and shareholder returns, often at the expense of genuine ardour for the industry and consumers they are meant to be serving. 

Tools like the DRM and the way they are enforced leave consumers feeling disconnected from the games they love, for example through the ability to play the games they legally acquired being taken away from them without any recourse. 

Furthermore, a chilling effect can be created in the gaming industry, as not only may competitors not want to innovate, worried about a DMCA notice regarding a specific design option, for example, but so will fans, who will question whether attempting to revive a game will be worth the time and effort, knowing the high likelihood of a cease-and-desist and takedown, regardless of the precautions they take, as in the Concord case. This directly hampers the gaming industry’s longevity.

In the author’s opinion, the only way forward is for major publishers to come together and adopt a pledge, promising to either open-source server code or provide a final DRM-free client when a game is officially abandoned. Otherwise, the author worries the anchors on which the gaming industry is built: passion and nostalgia of consumers, will eventually collapse. 

Whilst IP Rights are essential for game developers and publishers to safeguard their unique creative and technical components of their original works, they must not be enforced to an extent where not only can the gaming industry no longer innovate, as all creativity is firewalled behind teams of lawyers, but also where consumers, who form the basis of this dynamic industry, are left feeling powerless and unheard.

IP Supremacy vs. Longevity: How Copyright Claims, Like the Concord Takedown, Kill the Spirit of Esports (Image Generated by Gemini)

1. Andy Chalk, ‘Concord is being taken offline this week as Sony looks to ‘explore options’ that will ‘better reach our players” (PC Gamer, 3 September 2024) https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/concord-is-being-taken-offline-this-week-as-sony-looks-to-explore-options-that-will-better-reach-our-players/ accessed 19 November 2025. ↩︎
2. Paul Tassi, ‘The Ten Reasons PlayStation’s Concord Has Failed Disastrously’ (Forbes, 25 August 2024) https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/08/25/the-ten-reasons-playstations-concord-has-failed-disastrously/ accessed 20 November 2025.
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3. Chalk, ‘Concord is being taken offline’ (n 1).
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4. Adam Starkey, ‘Concord dies a second death as Sony takes legal action on fan revival’ (Metro, 17 November 2025) https://metro.co.uk/2025/11/17/concord-dies-a-second-death-sony-takes-legal-action-fan-revival-24727555/ accessed 19 November 2025. ↩︎
5. Andy Chalk, ‘Concord, one of the most infamous videogame flops of all time, creeps back to life thanks to fans who have spent months building custom server software’ (PC Gamer, 15 November 2025) https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/concord-one-of-the-most-infamous-videogame-flops-of-all-time-creeps-back-to-life-thanks-to-fans-who-have-spent-months-building-custom-server-software/ accessed 20 November 2025.
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6. Starkey (n 4).
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7. Chalk, ‘Concord, one of the most infamous videogame flops of all time’ (n 5). ↩︎
8. Starkey (n 4). ↩︎
9. Rick Lane, ‘Sony enforcers execute a legal visceral attack on the BloodbornePSX demake, continuing its mission to eradicate all traces of FromSoft’s beloved RPG on PC’ (PC Gamer, 9 February 2025) https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/sony-enforcers-execute-a-legal-visceral-attack-on-the-bloodbornepsx-demake-continuing-its-mission-to-eradicate-all-traces-of-fromsofts-beloved-rpg-on-pc/ accessed 20 November 2025.
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10. ‘The DMCA Notice and Takedown Process’ (Copyright Alliance, 2025) https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explained/the-digital-millennium-copyright-act-dmca/dmca-notice-takedown-process/ accessed 19 November 2025.
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11. Kenneth Poirier, ‘Why abuse of IP rights is killing the industry’ (Game Developer) https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/why-abuse-of-ip-rights-is-killing-the-industry accessed 19 November 2025. ↩︎
12. ibid.
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13. ibid.
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14. Lane (n 9).
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15. ‘Patents and copyrights abuse ruining innovation’ (Reddit, r/pcgaming) https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1kkvjc1/patents_and_copyrights_abuse_ruining_innovation/ accessed 20 November 2025.
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16. Chris Kerr, ‘Patch Notes 2: How does the game industry survive beyond 2025?’ (Game Developer) https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/patch-notes-2-how-does-the-game-industry-survive-beyond-2025- accessed 20 November 2025. ↩︎