Sony ‘still in the process of learning’ from Concord failure

8 November 2024

Sony’s president Hiroki Totoki has said the company is “still in the process of learning” from the failure of ‘Concord’.

Sony’s president Hiroki Totoki has said the company is ‘still in the process of learning’ following the failure of Concord

The hero-shooter – which was developed by the now-defunct Firewalk Studios – was ultimately shut down after it proved to be a disappointment when it was only able to attract around 25,000 players at its launch in September, and now the publisher’s head has said the company will be taking time to reflect on what went wrong.

In a Q+A session following Sony’s latest financial report, Totoki said: “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.”

Even so, senior vice president for finance and IR at Sony, Sadahiko Hayakawa, pointed out the studio was capable of launching successful live-service games such as ‘Helldivers 2’, and added the business has “learned a lot” from the reception to both the Arrowhead title and ‘Concord’.

He said: “‘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.”