Sony President Hiroki Totoki Discusses What Went Wrong with Concord

Sony President and CFO Hiroki Totoki recently discussed why Concord, the company’s short-lived live-service title, failed. Totoki’s comments came during a Q&A after Sony’s latest financial earnings call, where he detailed challenges faced during Concord’s development and launch, as well as broader insights for future live-service titles, according to VGC.

The sci-fi hero shooter, developed by Sony subsidiary Firewalk Studios, launched on August 23 but shut down just 11 days later. Reflecting on the rapid demise, Totoki explained that the company’s venture into live-service games is a learning process, stating, “You don’t know the result until you actually try it.”

Lessons in Evaluation and Timing

Totoki noted that a key issue was the lack of proper “gates”—such as user testing and internal evaluations. He emphasized that these checkpoints should have been implemented earlier to gauge Concord’s market viability. “We probably need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation,” Totoki explained. “And the timing of such gates… we should have done those gates much earlier than we did,” he added.

Structural Challenges Within Sony

Totoki also cited Sony’s “siloed organization” as a factor in the game’s failure, suggesting that poor inter-department communication hindered the development process. He believed that better collaboration could have improved the game’s outcome.

Differing Paths: Helldivers 2 and Concord

Sony’s senior VP Sadahiko Hayakawa compared Concord’s failure with the success of Helldivers 2, another live-service title that has performed well. Hayakawa noted that lessons learned from both games would be shared across Sony’s studios to improve future development strategies.

Concord

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Firewalk Studios

Release Date: 2024-08-23

PlayStation 5, Steam

Concord is an online team-based hero shooter in which two teams (referred in-game as crews) of five players compete against each other in several player versus player (PVP) game modes.

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