Sony’s president Hiroki Totoki has reflected on the brief release and failure of the company’s live-service flop, Concord.
Concord was the debut game from FireWalk Studios, which on its announcement promised players a “unique universe of vibrant worlds, and its rich cast of colourful characters”. However, despite high hopes from Sony, the game failed to take off, and after a lacklustre launch, the sci-fi shooter was taken offline just two weeks after its PS5 and PC debut.
In a Q&A following Sony’s latest financial report, management was asked more about Concord, and the company’s live service push. Here, Totoki said events from recent months had been a learning experience.
“Currently, we are still in the process of learning,” Totoki said via an interpreter (thanks, VGC). “And basically, with regards to new IP, of course, you don’t know the result until you actually try it.
“So for us, for our reflection, we probably need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates. And then we need to bring them forward, and we should have done those gates much earlier than we did.
“Also, we have a siloed organisation, so going beyond the boundaries of those organisations in terms of development, and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother.
“And then going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we do have many different windows. And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalisation, so that we can maximise our performance in terms of title launches.
“That’s all I have.”
Elsewhere during the same call, senior vice president for finance and IR at Sony, Sadahiko Hayakawa, noted the company had released two live service games, each with very different levels of success
“Helldivers 2 was a huge hit, while Concord ended up being shut down. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot from both,” the executive said.
“We intend to share the lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management as well as the process of continually adding expanded content and scaling the service after its release so as to strengthen our development management system.
“We intend to build on an optimum title portfolio during the current mid-range plan period that combines single-player games – which are our strengths and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP – with live-service games that pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release.”
On its release in February, Helldivers 2 soon became beloved by swathes of players wanting to do their bit for liberty by squashing Terminids and, on occasion, each other. On Steam, it reached a peak player count of 458,709. In contrast, Concord’s Steam all-time peak sits at just 697.
Sony shut down Concord developer Firewalk Studios in October, extinguishing hopes for any kind of revival.
In September, Totoki said Sony didn’t have enough original franchises which it has “fostered from the beginning”.