Hiroki Totoki, President, COO and CFO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, has touched on the failure of Firewalk Studios‘ Concord in a Q&A following the format holders latest financial results overnight.
Responding to questions about the Concord, which was shuttered after only 11 days due to its poor reception, Totoki-san responded that Sony is still learning when it comes to live service games, and aims to learn from its mistakes with Concord.
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.
Related Content — Upcoming PS5 Games 2024: The Best PS5 Games Coming Soon
Also, we have a siloed organisation, so going beyond the boundaries of those organisations in terms of development, and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother. 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.
Concord was released in late August of this year before being pulled offline in less than two weeks, while Sony attempted to figure out the best path. As it turns out, it decided to not only keep Concord offline for good, but also shutter Firewalk Studios completely. Not long after this, it was widely reported online that the live service shooter had cost the console maker around $200 million.
[Source – VGC]