Remedy Has A Plan To Make Sure Its Online Shooter Doesn’t Flop Like Concord

In 2025, the idea of releasing a paid, online-only multiplayer shooter seems very risky, as we’ve seen plenty of them fail. But Remedy, the developers behind Control and Alan Wake, have a plan to make sure their first multiplayer game—FBC: Firebreak—succeeds and doesn’t flop like Concord or XDefiant.

Announced in October 2024, FBC Firebreak is a co-op FPS set in the world of Control. It’s Remedy’s first online multiplayer game, and while it looks really cool, that might not be enough. Firebreak, which won’t be free-to-play, is entering an extremely crowded market filled with established and popular free-to-play shooters like Marvel Rivals, Counter-Strike 2, Fortnite, Overwatch 2, and Call of Duty Warzone. Remedy is aware of that, and plans to make Firebreak extremely accessible on launch.

In a recent interview with Gamesradar, Remedy communications director Thomas Puha explained that the studio wants to lower the barrier of entry to Firebreak to get as many people playing it on day one as possible. One big step to getting more people playing is that FBC: Firebreak will be launching on both Game Pass and PS Plus sometime later this year.

“This lowers the barrier of entry to try out the game, since millions of Game Pass and PlayStation Plus subscribers will have access. Of course, that’s a bit scary because so many players will hopefully be there during the launch window, and we hope the game holds up,” said Puha.

“It also means there’s financial backing and marketing support for the game from both first parties, which is crucial – especially as Remedy is self-publishing this game across all platforms.”

A big part of the plan to keep Firebreak from burning out in weeks or months, like Concord or XDefiant, is to release the upcoming shooter on both Steam and Epic. Remedy’s last two games arrived exclusively on the Epic Games Store, so this is a shift for the studio and will provide a larger pool of potential players for Firebreak at launch. Remedy plans to sell Firebreak as a “mid-priced” shooter and not a full $60 or $70 game, which will likely help it build an audience faster on PC.

The Alan Wake studio is also committed to making sure Firebreak has full cross-platform matchmaking across consoles and PC.

And another important part of Remedy’s plan is to keep FBC: Firebreak’s minimum specs on PC “reasonable.” Alan Wake 2 was a very pretty game, but it pushed computers and consoles and led to performance problems. The goal is to avoid that with Firebreak.

“We’ll still have great graphics and visual effects, all that you expect from Remedy, but in a multiplayer experience like this, framerate is king as well as the responsiveness of the controls,” explained Puha.

While there’s no guarantee that Firebreak will be able to succeed where so many other online shooters have failed, it’s good to see a studio being smart and realistic about the video game market. It’d be nice if we could assume that really good games will always sell well but that’s just not the case, and Remedy seems well aware of that, and is trying everything to avoid making the next big multiplayer flop.

FBC Firebreak arrives sometime in 2025 on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.

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