In the wake of Concord’s (2024) high-profile live-service flop, Sony and PlayStation are looking to shift their strategy moving forward in the hopes of mitigating such failures in the future.
Speaking during an interview with Financial Times, PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst outlined the company’s restructuring of focus, mainly how it will ensure first-party studios take more measured risks while still maintaining creative independence, all to avoid big, expensive failures 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,” he explained.
This move no doubt comes following the expensive failure of Concord, a live-service title which launched dead in the water and was subsequently shut down after only two weeks following dismal sales and negative reviews, which also led to the shuttering of developer Firewalk Studios shortly after. According to Financial Times analysts, the game cost upwards of US$250 million to make, making its demise a pricey one of the company.
For Hulst, this failure was an apt learning lesson for the studio, and one they can take moving forward to spot such failures and address them before they blow up further. “The number [of live-service releases] is not so important. What is important to me is having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities,” he explained, “We have since put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing in very many different ways,… the advantage of every failure… is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is.”
His comments were further supported by other Sony studio heads, who explained the need for more focused group testing, increased collaboration between the internal Sony team, and closer relationships between top executives who have the most experience with an upcoming title before it releases.
Will Concord’s failure be a silver lining for the studio to push out better quality games in the future? Only time will tell, as PlayStation has seemingly doubled down on the live-service format with the recently announced Marathon from Bungie that’s due early next year, maybe that game’s success, or more likely, failure, judging from its development journey, will finally be the tipping point for Sony and PlayStation to drop the much-loathed live-service format once and for all.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
