A screenshot from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios and an image from TheMilaJam Instagram

The development team or at the very least the community management team has reportedly removed a controversial tag from Concord’s store page following game’s release and abysmally bad player counts.

A screenshot from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios

The official Concord account on X confirmed the game went on sale at 1:00 PM ET on August 23, 2024 writing, “Do you think you can handle the Wilds? It’s time to find out because Concord is NOW live!”

About 10 hours later Steam user Moddingspree noted that Firewalk Studios, the developer, removed the LGBT and political tags from the game. He wrote in the game’s Steam forum, “LGBT and political tags removed and blacklisted.”

He continued, “The developers made a big deal about this game being for ‘modern audiences’ (all 600 of them), but for some reason demanded steam to not only remove these two tags but also to blacklist them plus any similar tag. It’s too late, people already know that this ‘game’ has a clear agenda… I mean, the characters speak for themselves.”

Moddingspree on Steam

Another user poka commented, “REJECTING LGBTQ+ tag is a good start. Pander to us normal casual gamer more developer. Look how the modern audiences leave you stranded with almost zero sales that not enough to cover your development cost. Pander to us so that way, game studio win, player win and steam win too. REJECTING LGBTQ+ tag is a small step towards better profit for future game.”

Poka on Steam

Another named Kai questioned, “Why were the tags LGBTQ+ and Political removed?”

He added, “I sort of understand why Political was removed since its a game and has nothing to do with politics but LGBTQ+ was a good representative tag, why was it removed? How the heck am i supposed to find good games for me and my husband? I wont even talk about whole 308 playercount thing, chuds RUINED it for us, as fans of Destiny 2 we were looking forward to this game, where the heck we supposed to go now? Do devs really care about money more than GOOD RIGHT HUMANE IDEALS? SHAME TO YOU! BOTH TO CHUDS AND DEVS WHO COULDNT STAND FOR THEIR IDEALS.”

Kai on Steam

As of writing, the LGBTQ+ tag has indeed been removed, but the game still features the “politics” and “political sim” tags.

A screenshot of Concord’s Steam storefront

As noted by former World of Warcraft Team Lead Mark Kern aka Grummz, Firewalk Studios is the one who manages the top five tags on the game. He writes on X, “Concord devs are busy deleting the LGBTQ+ and Political tags from their game. These are added by both devs users but the top 5 tags that appear are sorted based on developer control. They used to display them proudly.”

He added, “Since community notes is trying to claim these are under user control, I’ve posted the Steamworks documentation to show how devs control the order of the tags and which tags apply. They are absolutely running away from these terms.”

 

As can be seen in one of the images that Grummz shared the LGBTQ+ tag was the top listed tag for the game. The tag is not listed as one of the 16 tags that are shown to users as of the time of writing.

A screenshot of a list of tags on Concord’s Steam storefront.

Furthermore, in Valve’s Steamworks Documentation that Grummz cites it clearly states, “In addition to helping Steam users quickly learn about your game, tags help Steam determine where your game should be displayed to customers. We recently began requiring at least 5 tags be applied to a title before its launch on Steam, but we recommend you add up to 20.”

It reiterates this later in the document, “The tags given the most weight govern your visibility more than those given less. Your title’s top 5 tags should paint a fairly clear picture of your game as those tags will also be used to describe your game. Tags are ordered on your game page by the amount of weight each has on your game, as a result of your own sorting in the Tag Wizard. This can be modified over time as a number of players apply particular tags to your game. Some store filters prioritize the first 15 tags, so be sure that these are sorted in order of relevance to your title.”

A screenshot from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios

It also makes clear developers can override the Suggest Prioritization feature, “The Tag Wizard helps set these weights with a Suggest Prioritization feature. This is a very simple algorithm that moves high-information tags like sub-genres to the top, and redundant or low-information tags (like “indie” or “singleplayer”) to the bottom. It’s just meant as a simple starting point. It’s not guaranteed to be accurate because it has no knowledge of what your game is actually like. Feel free to try it as a starting point, and override it as you see fit.

The document then explains that developers can indeed remove tags as they see fit, “Customers will also tag your game and those tags will be mixed in with the tags you had set with the Tag Wizard. As customers add more tags, the weight for those tags will increase. You can remove any tags you find unwanted (‘family friendly’ for a horror game) or inaccurate (‘2D’ for a 3D game).”

A screenshot of Valve’s Steamworks Documentation website

The removal of the LGBTQ+ tag comes after the game failed to even hit 700 concurrent players on the day that it launched.

Concord Steam DB concurrent player chart

What do you make of the LGBTQ+ tag being removed from Concord?