Sony On Concord’s Failure: “We’re Still Learning”

Sony has been in the gaming business for as long as one can remember, enjoying its recognition as one of the biggest giants of the industry, but when things go wrong, they go really wrong. Speaking in a recent investors call, the current president of Sony Group Corporation Hiroki Totoki has let out an interesting statement with regard to Concord’s massive failure. 

Currently, we are still in the process of learning. 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” (h/t VGC).

For those who missed it, Concord was in development for about 8 years, sucking in a budget of somewhere around $400 million. As soon as the game was first revealed, players flocked together to oppose the idea, and when the live service shooter finally launched in August this year, it was able to gather 697 concurrent users on PC. Well, isn’t that a shame? 

I do not remember the last time a AAA release of this stature failed this hard. Do you? 

Concord Served As A Hard, Bitter Lesson And Nothing Else

In the same call, Helldives 2 was put in stark comparison against Concord, with the emphasis on the former’s success and high-flying results made apparent. 

We launched two live service games this year. 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. 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.” 

Concord came out on August 23, 2024, and went back where it came from on September 6, 2024, getting shut down permanently along with the developer studio Firewalk.