Sony acquired Firewalk Studios in 2023, two years after both companies announced their collaboration for a AAA live-service project, later revealed to be Concord. Firewalk’s acquisition indicated that the Japanese company was quite confident with Concord, as it rarely purchases studios that haven’t released a project.
However, Concord‘s debut in August 2024 turned out to be a massive disaster in PlayStation’s history, as it sold less than 30,000 copies across PC and PS5. The game was pulled offline, and refunds were dished out to everyone just two weeks after the debut.
Many thought that Sony wouldn’t learn from this failure and would continue pushing for such horrendous titles without listening to player feedback. However, it seems like the gaming giant has finally learned its lesson and won’t repeat this mistake with future projects.
Sony Accepts its Concord Failure and Plans to Depend on User Testing
In Sony’s recent financial call, the company’s president, COO, and CFO Hiroki Totokii opened up about the failures of Concord and its record-breaking hit of Helldivers 2.
When talking about the hero-shooter, Totokii stated that it should have run its development gates and depended on user testing or internal evaluation much earlier than it did. Next time, Sony will seek proper confirmation that a live-service game can lure in players.
Basically, with regards to new IP, of course you don’t know the result until you actually try it. So for our reflection, probably we need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates, we need to bring them forward. We should have done those gates much earlier than we did.
According to Totokii, Sony should’ve noticed and reacted to the issues with Concord much earlier while developing the game so that it could’ve reached the same heights as Helldivers 2. He also blamed the company’s “siloed organization” and the game’s release window. If you’ve forgotten, the hero-shooter debuted not too long after Black Myth Wukong.
However, the Japanese company needs to understand that listening to “feedback early” doesn’t necessarily lead to good results. Helldivers 2 was a massive success, but it wasn’t a known title before its debut. It didn’t receive many public betas, so it can’t be said that listening to feedback is always crucial.
Putting Concord in front of the gaming community still wouldn’t have led to success because it was destined to be a failure. It couldn’t set itself apart in the hero-shooter genre that was already occupied by giants such as Overwatch 2 and Apex Legends.
Sony Isn’t Giving Firewalk Studios Another Chance
You’d think after the failure of Concord, the gaming giant would give its Firewalk Studios another shot. The studio is filled with veterans from Halo and Destiny veterans who gave us some generational hits that have gone down in gaming history.
However, Sony has decided to pull the plug for FIrewalk Studios, quashing all and any hopes for a potential revival of the failed hero-shooter down the line.
While Sony’s decision might seem harsh for Firewalk Studios, many experts predicted that the game would be written off, especially after the reports that it cost $400 million to craft over the course of eight years.
All of this is quite shocking, considering Sony considered Concord to be the future of PlayStation and a rival to Star Wars. We can only hope that the gaming giant’s next live-service game isn’t a tragedy like Concord.
With that said, do you think Concord had the potential to be Sony’s next big hit? Let us know in the comments below.
