Sony President Admits ‘Concord’ Had Dev Problems, Says Failed Hero Shooter Needed More “User Testing” And “Internal Evaluation”
In the aftermath of the game’s historically short two-week existence, Sony President Hiroki Totoki has admitted to the fact that like its overall creative direction, the actual development process of Concord was also mired with problems.
Totoki, who also serves as the entertainment conglomerate’s COO and CFO, offered this posthumous reflection on the widely-panned hero shooter on November 8th during the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call.
Reflecting on Concord‘s near-immediate implosion, as relayed to English-speaking attendees through an interpreter and recapped to the public by VGC, the exec admitted that while the company was “still in the process of learning” from the game’s failure, they had already identified a number of areas where both Sony and Firewalk Studios had dropped the ball during development.
“With regards to new IP, of course, you don’t know the result until you actually try it,” said Totoki. “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.”
He continued, “Also, we have a siloed organization [in other words, the company’s various divisions and studios all operate independently from each other, and as such they do not regularly communicate and share information], so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations 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,” he concluded. “And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalization, so that we can maximize our performance in terms of title launches.”
Putting a bow on his colleague’s observations, at a later point in the call, Sony Senior VP Finance And Investor Relations Sadahiko Hayakawa noted, “We launched two live-service games this year,” and explained, “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,” he added. “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.”
Of course, regardless of what they lessons they’ve actually learned or how they plan to improve their output going forward, Sony will be doing so without the talents of Concord developer Firewalk Studios, whose doors were recently shuttered by the parent company due specifically to the failure of their one-and-only game.
In an October 29th statement posted to the official Sony Interactive Entertainment website, Sony Studio Business Group CEO Herman Hulst announced that “after much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset [Concord] and close [Firewalk Studios].”
“I want to thank all of Firewalk for their craftsmanship, creative spirit and dedication,” he said. “The PvP first person shooter genre is a competitive space that’s continuously evolving, and unfortunately, we did not hit our targets with this title. We will take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.”
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