Sony president on Concord’s historic failure – ”we are still in the process of learning”

PlayStation’s exclusive hero shooter Concord has gone down in history as one of the biggest failures in video game history, being shut down after less than two weeks and resulting in the closure of Firewalk Studios. After the colossal failure for the gaming brand, Sony addressed the elephant in the room in its latest financials call.

In a Sony Q&A after the financials call, Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki discussed the failure of Concord, but still doubled down on a future of live-service multiplayer.

Learning from Concord’s

In the financials call, Totoki reflected on the failure of the new multiplayer IP. While many would assume this failure would result in a shift back towards the brand’s success of single-player titles, Sony s still planning to go hard on more multiplayer games such as the upcoming Marathon.

“Currently, we are still in the process of learning,” the Sony president said. “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.”

The Sony COO and CFO explained that Concord suffered from “cannibalisation”, launching amidst a wave of other multiplayer games and not long after the brand’s own Helldivers 2. In the future, Sony will spread the releases of its multiplayer offerings to give them more chance to breathe.

“Going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we do have many different windows,” Totoki said. “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.”

More multiplayer from PlayStation

At the time of writing, Sony has numerous multiplayer games in development. Alongside Bungie’s Marathon, the gaming giant has a bunch of unannounced titles in development for its live-service push, with no signs of stopping.

On the other hand, Sony is still pushing hard on its single-player offerings as well. Ghost of Yotei is slated to release in 2025, as well as timed-exclusive Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Marvel’s Wolverine. New single-player games are reportedly in development at Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica and more.