Sony Shuts Down Studio Behind Concord Less Than Two Years After Buying It

An anonymous reader writes: Firewalk Studios, whom Sony Interactive Entertainment bought from Probably Monsters, has been shut down after disastrous Concord game launch. Kotaku adds: The team was responsible for Concord, the company's sci-fi hero shooter that bombed so badly it was taken offline just weeks after its launch earlier this year. The news comes less than two years after the PlayStation 5 maker first acquired Firewalk Studios as part of its ambitious plans for live service gaming.

Firewalk Studios was formed in 2018 as a few ex-Bungie developers working on a new multiplayer shooter under the umbrella of the gaming studio startup Probably Monsters, formed by ex-Bungie CEO Harold Ryan. Concord was in development for years and picked up by Sony early on as a promising prospect for its portfolio of planned live service games.

Re:

[thegarbz]

The ex employees will be fine. I'm sure they'll bounce back.

Trojan Horse

[techsoldaten]

The whole situation is so bad, I can't help but suspect the former Bungie employees had some incentive to make the acquisition worthless.

Re:

[rickb928]

So firing yourself will teach those corporate weasels to try and keep you employed long enough to build a hit. Ha!

It was just mismanagement

[rsilvergun]

One of the big wigs at Sony made Concord his baby and threw way way too much money at it which caused the scope of what should have been a small quick and dirty game to balloon out of control.

If you're old enough to remember it the same thing happened with rise of the robots back in the old Amiga and Sega Genesis days. A ton of money got thrown at a project that should have been pretty minor and the whole thing became a huge mess.

The difference is back then you could go to some video game magazines

Re:

[gweihir]

Makes sense. Blowing something up beyond its original scope and design is very risky and routinely fails. Does not only apply to games. Engineers of all types get taught this. You would expect management people to know that too, but usually they do not even have a management education that is worth anything. Even just studying the history of mis-management should prevent things like this. But sadly, while engineering failure is taught (often integrated into other subjects), management failure seems to be ra

Didn't solicit feedback

[RobinH]

The general consensus of players is that they took 8 years to develop it and didn't really solicit or listen to any player feedback before it came out, and they released a full price title in a genre where most games are free-to-play. The characters weren't compelling and the game-play felt sluggish. What a waste of money and time.

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[BigFire]

They were chasing Over Watch trend. Had it come out 4 years ago, it may have made a different, but the development took too long. Plus all of the Hero Shooter nowadays are free to play.

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[alvinrod]

Even if they launched four years ago they'd still be DOA based on what they had this year. Overwatch was more polished gameplay wise, had better character design, and other things going for it. There were other games that tried to compete with Overwatch that were better than Concord that still died or were relegated to the free to play bin to try to scrape out a meager existence. This game was definitely "too late" to capture an audience, but it was also "too little" to hope to do so even if it were more ti

All the feedback in the world wasn't going to save

[rsilvergun]

Concord. It was just a mediocre game going up against titles that were already free to play as opposed to 40 bucks. The game should have come out years ago so it could have competed head-on with OverWatch now it's going up against several years of overwatch 2 content coupled with the much higher system requirements on the PC version. Add to that it's just difficult to peel people away from the game they're already playing and they didn't have a prayer in hell.

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[gweihir]

Basically "target fixation". When that happens you become so convinced you are doing it right that you do not listen to outside feedback anymore and do not seek it. Interestingly, the term comes from jet-fighter pilot training. Apparently, if you fixate too much on your target, you crash. Not limited to that domain at all though. Even applies to politics.

And the lesson here, which those that need it will not bother to learn, is that details matter and context is everything.

Japan HQ parody video

[UnknownSoldier]

Dogen has a hilarious parody video [youtube.com] of Sony Japan reacting to Concord.

Best comment from YT:

"I didn't realize these characters were popular in America."

Don't worry, neither did the Americans.

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[Pseudonymous Powers]

I know, right? I mean, "Defender." It's right there in the name. It might as well be named "Shitlib: Fartgate". I'm sorry, it's those humanoids' own fault if they're getting kidnapped by immigrants. We warned them that would happen! But no, they had to be "humane-oid". Well, they can leave me and MY starfighter, which I have named Sweet Randy Ayn, out of it.

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[gweihir]

Probably not. There are enough really conventional and well-known failure factors here. "Woke" is likely just a minor factor or not a factor at all.

What an uninspired decision

[burni2]

1.) You buy a dev studio, that is able to release a working game (some quirks may occur)
2.) You have a working game and a working dev team
3.) So you hit some bumps on the road, but decide that your expensive car needs a suspension overhaul, so you scrape it! You don't even sell it! You scrape it!

I think between all these F2P shooters there could still be a somewhat profitable niche, different take than all other not worthless content flooding, but with player engagement, player inspired mods, a map editor,

Re:

[Luckyo]

It's likely the only sane one to take. Rumors suggest that the new PS5 version had a massively cut down trailer because so much of it was supposed to be about being able to run Concord well. Sony bet the house on the damn thing.

And reception damaged reputation so badly, that any reminder of this game being alive would have simply kept the wound open and hemorrhaging. Even if you pretend there was some kind of future for this product, its mere existence was likely costing Sony massively in reputational damag