There have been two massive questions hanging over Concord, the expensive PlayStation 5 hero shooter that almost nobody played. The first one is: how did a game that wasn’t busted or terrible bomb so spectacularly? The second is: how did a game seemingly destined to fail get through Sony’s quality checks, renowned for setting the bar for modern gaming blockbusters? It was the latter question that company president Hiroki Totoki tried to answer in a call with earnings analysts on Friday.
The chief operations officer who directly oversees Sony’s PlayStation business made four points about what happened with Concord, and how the company might do things differently in the future. Firstly, he suggested PlayStation needs to be checking in earlier on during the development process to determine if things are on track or not. Secondly, the company has been too siloed when approaching new projects, needing more communication between teams. Thirdly, the release timing for Concord might have been especially bad. And finally, live-service multiplayer games are just risky even if everything is done right.
Here are Totoki’s full comments during today’s second quarter earnings call via Sony’s translator:
Currently, we are still in the process of learning and basically with regards to IP you don’t know the result until you actually try it. So for us for our reflection probably we need to have a lot of gates including user testing and user evaluation and the timing of such gates we need to bring them forward and we should have done those gates much earlier than we did.
And also we did have a siloed organization so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations in both development and sales and I think that could have been much more smoother.
Going forward in our first-party titles and third-party title we do have many different windows and we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalization so we can maximize performance in terms of title launches.
Concord launched back in August, and struggled to gain any traction with players—a death sentence for a live service game that relies in part on a healthy player pool to reduce matchmaking times, and make players confident that the game they’re investing in won’t soon disappear. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened with the hero shooter after Sony took the unprecedented step of unreleasing it just a couple weeks later. The game, with an initial development deal Kotaku previously reported at $200 million, has since been fully refunded and the team behind it, Firewalk Studios, disbanded in a mass layoff last month.
“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,” PlayStation co-CEO Hermen Hulst said at the time. “We will take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.” The 170 developers cut as part of Firewalk brings Sony’s total gaming layoffs for the year up to 1,290.
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