'It's really hard to succeed every time' says PUBG director on failure of games like Concord and Highguard

• PUBG: Battlegrounds director Taeseok Jang has spoken on live-service failures like Concord
• He argued that "it's really hard to succeed every time" when making such games
• He also revealed that he views such failures as a learning opportunity

PUBG: Battlegrounds director Taeseok Jang has said that the recent high-profile failure of live-service games like Concord and Highguard is disappointing, but he views them as a learning opportunity for developers.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, Jang said that "it's really hard to succeed every time" when making new games. He continued: "I try to put myself in their positions and try to think, 'oh, what could I have done better in that situation?'"

He explained that ultimately the goal is to "try to learn from it" and avoid the same mistakes.

Sony's online shooter Concord launched for PlayStation 5 and PC back on August 23, 2024. It only managed to attract just under 700 players on launch day on Steam, according to SteamDB data. That's an almost unbelievably poor showing for a major game that would indicate catastrophically low sales, even when you factor in potential copies shifted for consoles.

The game shut down just two weeks after launch, with the servers going offline for good, and retailers refunded those who purchased the game.

Although less dramatic, free-to-play hero shooter Highguard was a similar flop. It came out for PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC on January 26, 2026, and despite some decent initial player numbers, the game lost its audience over the course of a few weeks and was taken offline at the start of March.

Despite Jang's words, developer PUBG Corporation has had some similar failures of its own. Back in February it launched PUBG: Blindspot, a top-down PUBG spin-off that only lasted a couple of months before having its service ended.

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