Sony leadership has discussed some of the factors behind the failure of the Concord live shooting service.
VGC reported that investors asked management multiple questions about the game‘s collapse during the earnings call that followed Sony’s most recent financial statements.
Sony President, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki said, through an interpreter, that the platform owner is “still in the learning process” when it comes to live service games, but that several areas of improvement have already been identified for future titles.
“When it comes to new intellectual property, of course, you don’t know the outcome until you try it,” he said.
“We probably need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluations, and the timing of those gates. And then we need to bring them forward, and we should have done those gates much earlier than we did.
“Also, we have a siled organization, so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations in terms of development and also sales, I think could have been a lot easier.
“And then in the future, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we have many different windows. And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can implement them on our own platform without cannibalization. so that we can maximize our performance in terms of title releases”.
Concord launched on August 23 and was pulled offline 11 days later due to poor sales. Players were offered a full refund, while Sony said it would work with developer Firewalk Studios to “determine the best path forward.”
Last week, Sony revealed that the path forward meant closing Firewalk Studios and permanently closing Concord.
Elsewhere on the earnings call, VGC reported that Sadahiko Hayakawa, Sony’s senior vice president of finance and investor relations, emphasized that while Concord failed, the company has been successful with live service launches in 2024.
“This year we launched two live service games,” he said. “Helldivers 2 was a huge success, while Concord ended up being closed. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot from both of them.
“We intend to share lessons learned from our successes and failures across all of our studios, including the areas of title development management, as well as the process of continually adding expanded content and scaling the service after its launch to strengthen our system. of development management.
“We intend to leverage an optimal portfolio of titles 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 seek advantages while assuming a certain amount of risk upon release.”
Hayakawa’s comments affirm that Sony will continue to venture into the live service space, with the company announcing around this time last year that it would release six such titles by the end of March 2026.
