Caravan SandWitch Dev Marked Post-Launch Milestone, Surpassing Concord's All-Time Player Peak

Plane Toast's exploration adventure game Caravan SandWitch has just celebrated its successful launch for consoles and PCs this month as players embark on a mysterious adventure across the game's "sci-fi Provence-like world." As players traversed across Cigalo with nothing but their camper van in solving an "engrossing mystery," the developer celebrated a milestone but at the expense of a recent Sony mishap.

Early this month, Game Director at Firewalk Studios Ryan Ellis announced via the PlayStation Blog that their live-service FPS shooter Concord will be taken offline starting from 6th September 2024 and offering full refunds to all players. While the game's all-time peak players had been closely monitored by players and critics before and after launch, Caravan SandWitch's developer made a comparison between their game and Concord in all-time peak players, which they highlighted on social media.

Caravan SandWitch follows its protagonist in an ominous adventure across Cigalo, motivated by the mysterious disappearance of their sister that unravels every step of the way. The game is greatly emphasized in its exploration gameplay component, in which players can navigate the post-apocalyptic work on foot or inside their camper van, and this simple approach to the game appears to be winning players over.

The developer commemorated the game's recent successes post-launch when it made a post to their Twitter account fairly recently, which could be viewed as adding "insult to injury. For context, the developer compared the all-time peak stat via Steam DB for Caravan SandWitch and Concord between their respective releases until 16th September 2024.

At the time of the tweet, Concord's all-time peak was at 697 players, while Caravan SandWitch was at 756 players, which they mentioned in the aforementioned Twitter post. This was followed up in a related post, which read, "Something something the issue wasn't really the something everyone was something about," as the handful of responses the posts received highlighted the need and demand for independent studios and publishers while criticizing how executive issues hampered Concord's potential success.

Granted, the post may come across as demeaning or insulting given the nature surrounding Concord's marketing and subsequent release, the developer responded to one post criticizing them, stating that their post wasn't intended at "making fun," as the team at Firewalk Studios "did great, the workers are great," however, Concord's demise "was an exec problem."