Sony Says It Should Have Done User Testing and Internal Evaluation Earlier on Concord

Sony has reflected on the disastrous launch of PlayStation 5 game Concord, saying it’s still learning when it comes to live service games.

Concord, a live service hero shooter from Sony-owned Firewalk Studios, has gone down as one of the biggest flops in PlayStation history. Amid disastrously low player numbers, Sony hauled Concord offline just two weeks after launch. It eventually shuttered Firewalk and confirmed Concord wouldn’t return.

It has proved a costly failure for Sony. Concord’s initial development deal was around $200 million according to a report by Kotaku, which cited two sources familiar with the agreement. They said the $200 million was not enough to fund Concord’s entire development, nor did it include the purchase of the Concord IP rights or Firewalk Studios itself. Kotaku’s number aligns with an earlier report saying that ProbablyMonsters — Firewalk’s original parent company — raised $200 million in 2021.

It all points to Concord being seen as an ambitious project that was expected to attract a large audience. Instead it launched to tepid reviews and low interest, prompting PlayStation to pull the plug within days of release. One estimate suggested it only sold around 25,000 copies.

Midia Research analyst Rhys Elliott told IGN shortly before Concord was shut down: “Pivoting to live services is high-risk, high-reward venture, and the risk is heightening to levels that might not be worth it for many AAA console/PC publishers that aren’t already active in the space.”

In a recent financial call, Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki said the company has learned lessons from both the record-breaking launch of Helldivers 2 earlier this year and Concord’s failure. On Concord specifically, Totoki said Sony should have run its development gates such as user testing or internal evaluation “much earlier than we did.”

“Currently we are still in the process of learning,” Totoki said. “Basically, with regards to new IP, of course you don’t know the result until you actually try it. So for our reflection, probably we need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates, we need to bring them forward. We should have done those gates much earlier than we did.”

The suggestion here from Totoki is that Sony should have noticed and reacted to Concord’s issues earlier in the development process, presumably so that it could have improved the game before launch.

Totoki then went on to point fingers at Sony’s “siloed organization” and Concord’s release window, which may have caused cannibalisation. Concord launched in August, not long after smash hit Black Myth: Wukong hit PS5 and PC.

“We have a siloed organization, so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations in terms of development and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother,” Totoki said.

“And then going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we do have many different windows. And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalisation, so that we can maximize our performance in terms of title launches. That’s all I have.”

Of course, Concord launched into the ultra competitive live service hero shooter market following the failure of Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which contributed to a $200 million hit to publisher Warner Bros.’ revenue.

During the same financial call, Sony senior vice president for finance and IR Sadahiko Hayakawa compared the launches of Helldivers 2 and Concord, saying lessons learned would be shared throughout the business.

“We launched two live-service games this year,” 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.

“We intend to build on an optimum title portfolio during the current mid-range plan period that combines single-player games — which are our strengths and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP — with live-service games that pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release.”

Sony’s live service push has seen mixed results so far. Helldivers 2 is the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time with an incredible 12 million copies sold in just 12 weeks, but other live service games have fallen by the wayside. In December last year, Naughty Dog canceled a live service The Last of Us multiplayer game and announced plans to focus on single-player games. Sony-owned developer Bungie, meanwhile, has suffered significant layoffs as a result of Destiny 2’s struggles. The failure of Concord and the closure of Firewalk is yet another troubling development for PlayStation live service.

Looking to the future, a number of PlayStation live service games remain in the works, including Bungie’s Marathon, Guerrilla’s Horizon Online, and Haven Studio’s Fairgame$.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.