Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Sony executives explained the failure of Concord in a call with investors. They blamed the failure of the August PvP event on the company’s inexperience in live service titles, lack of cooperation between divisions and the unpredictability of the new brand. The statement was noted by VGC magazine. “At the moment, we’re still learning. And when it comes to new IP, basically, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out until you actually try it,” says Hiroki Totoki, Sony’s president and chairman of PlayStation, who also briefly led as interim CEO in the spring.
“In terms of our reflection, we’ll probably have to add a lot of checkpoints, including user testing or internal reviews, and time those points. We need to go through them much earlier,” he continues. “In addition, we have very isolated divisions, and crossing their boundaries in terms of development or sales planning could have been much smoother, in my opinion,” he adds, talking about a poorly chosen release date that may have made Concord and third-party titles parasitic on each other. He’s apparently referring to Black Myth: Wukong, which arrived three days early.
Totoki is complemented by Sadahiko Hajakawa, Sony’s finance and investment vice president: “We launched two live service games this year. Helldivers 2 is a huge hit, while Concord was discontinued. In both cases, we gained a lot of experience and learned a lot.” He reveals that in the future they want to build on established brands with live service games. Concord didn’t even last three weeks active after its release on August 23. Due to a lack of players caused by very poor sales, Sony pulled the game from sale, shut down the servers and refunded customers. The Firewalk studio closed at the end of October.
