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After a high-profile failure in Concord and a high-profile success in Astro Bot last year, PlayStation is looking to adjust its strategy to incorporate fewer live service games, more big franchises, and stricter oversight of its owned studios.
In an interview with Financial Times, PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst says the company is hoping to mitigate future big, expensive risks with future games. “I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply.”
Concord was not a cheap failure. Analysts estimate Sony spent around $250m on the game, only for it to sell so poorly that Sony shut it down two weeks after launch, and shuttered its developer, Firewalk Studios, not long after. By contrast, Astro Bot also launched last year to universal acclaim, winning multiple awards and selling 2.3 million copies as of March 2025, one of the best-selling games on PlayStation 5.
The differences between the two games are myriad, certainly, and their development stories are quite different as well. But what Hulst has taken away from this is that there needs to be more supervision of Sony’s owned studios to ensure that games veering in the direction of Concord are spotted before they become expensive failures, so they can be canceled or corrected in time.
“We have since put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing in very many different ways,” Hulst said. “The advantage of every failure . . . is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is.”
Financial Times spoke to multiple Sony studio heads, who said that this oversight means more focus on group testing, more communication between internal Sony studios, and closer relationships between the studios’ top executives. “If we’re heading towards a giant landmine, like there’s another studio making exactly the same game, that’s good information,” said Jason Connell, art director at Ghost of Yōtei studio Sucker Punch.
That comment rings especially poignant in light of Concord’s failure, which analysts say occurred for a number of reasons, including an oversaturation of multiplayer, live service shooters. Hulst suggests in the interview that PlayStation isn’t as intent on churning out live service games as it used to be. That said, PlayStation does have Bungie’s Marathon coming up before March 2026, a game that has a number of Bungie fans concerned amid delays, staff layoffs, and a general lack of information as to what the game entails.
But there’s another strategy Hulst also wants to pursue: he wants more, massive Sony IP. Astro Bot’s success has come about over the course of multiple games, with the little robot icon growing in popularity each time. According to Financial Times, Hulst wants studios to be thinking about how their IP can be turned into bigger and bigger franchises over time, following in the footsteps of The Last of Us and Uncharted. “We take a very intentional approach to IP creation . . . understanding how a new concept can turn into an iconic franchise for PlayStation, that can then again become a franchise for people beyond gaming,” he said.
Currently on the docket, PlayStation has Ghost of Yōtei and Lost Soul Aside coming this year, with Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls and Housemarque’s Saros for 2026. Other games such as Fairgames, Marvel’s Wolverine, Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Marathon, and more remain in the works.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
