No one wanted these PS5 Concord discs until Sony stopped making them

As recently as a week ago, a new disc copy of Sony's team-based shooter Concord on the PlayStation 5 would set you back about $40 at most retailers. Now that Sony has shut off the game's servers after just two weeks, you might think those now-useless discs would be practically worthless.

Instead, the physical version of Concord on PS5 has become a surprise collector's item. An Ars analysis of nearly 300 eBay listings completed between September 3–8 shows new copies of the now-defunct game selling for a median price of $100 since the game's shutdown. That going rate peaked at a median of $118 on September 5, up from $89.50 on September 3, before settling at $110 for eBay sales made on September 8.

Supply and demand

As usual with gaming collectibles, the price increase has less to do with playability and more to do with rarity. GameDiscoverCo analyst Simon Carless told IGN last month that he estimated an underwhelming 25,000 total sales for Concord across PS5 and PC. Even if we assume 80 percent of those sales were on the PS5, most of those console sales probably came as purely digital downloads, given long-running industry trends and the game's focus on online play.

That means the total number of PS5 Concord discs in the wild could number in the single-digit thousands, easily making it one of the rarest physical first-party games Sony has ever released. And with Sony officially halting Concord sales as of September 3, that number isn't going to go up anytime soon.

Sony encouraged players who purchased a physical copy of Concord to "please refer to the refund process of the retailer you purchased it from to obtain your refund." Players who followed that advice missed out on the opportunity to make a pretty quick return on their investment through eBay reselling, though. A couple of lucky eBay sellers even pulled in nearly $500 for sealed copies of the game sold on September 5.

Even without those kinds of outliers, though, 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 well under a month. And the photos on some of those eBay listings suggest a few sellers were looking to cash in by reselling dozens of copies in individual lots.

The collector's mania for Concord has seemingly extended to a limited edition-themed controller that Sony was selling for $85 as well. Completed eBay listings for that controller went for a median price of $252.50 on September 8, up from just $132 on September 3. Unlike the game they're based on, though, those controllers have the benefit of still working with PS5 hardware well into the future.

At the moment, it's hard to tell how long these pricing trends will last. If there's a wider market of PlayStation collectors looking for a rare piece of Sony history, Concord could become the modern equivalent of the NES' Stadium Events—a rare but forgettable game that collectors still value. But if speculators are driving the current mania—hoping to quickly resell it for more to the next person in line—the pricing bubble could burst just as quickly as it inflated.

All that speculation could also come crashing down if Sony decides to relaunch Concord sales in the future. In the game's shutdown announcement, Sony said it was "explor[ing] options, including those that will better reach our players." Already, there is a tongue-in-cheek petition effort to convince Sony to do just that, with nearly 2,000 signatories to its name. "We were all busy that week," the petition's title reads. "Please release Concord again."

Listing image by eBay