After years of console dominance, we’re starting to see cracks in the PlayStation brand as it brute-forces its way to live service supremacy. There is no clearer example of this than the high-profile failure of Concord and the closure of Firewalk Studio.
This week, PlayStation announced it would close Firewalk Studio, a developer founded in 2018 that Sony acquired last year. The reason for the acquisition and the closure are the same: Concord, a live-service PvP hero shooter released on both PS5 and PC, developed by creatives who cut their teeth in games like Destiny and Call of Duty.
To be completely honest, Concord bombed. According to SteamDB datathe number of players on PC has never exceeded 1000, and is estimated sales figures on both PS5 and Steam were terrible. At the time of its disastrous launch, I detailed the reasons why Concord failed to land, including the eight years it spent in development, which caused it to completely miss the hero shooter trend kick-started by Team Fortress in 2007 2 and peaked with Overwatch in 2016:
“Knowing the cost and development time required for a AAA online game, studios must judge, predict, and/or simply guess what the next big hit will be. Which games will be successful in four, five, six years if we start developing them right now? Will audiences still care about this kind of game when we’re finally ready to release it? It practically requires the help of a fortune teller to get the answer right.”
Basically, if you start making a game based on what’s popular now, you’re probably already too late.
This fairly simple mistake is compounded by Concord’s exorbitant development costs. The massive budget that allowed for PlayStation’s signature top-notch visuals and a library of cinematic cutscenes that we’ll never see meant that while rivals were released free-to-play, Sony opted to sell the game for $40. Combined with low consumer awareness and a wide range of high-quality, free alternatives, Concord’s price put it at a huge – and, as it turns out, fatal – disadvantage.
Content-wise, it’s hard to say that Concord was fully baked when it launched. The character kits were clunky at best, the systems – which Firewalk said combine elements of fighting games and card games – were mostly unclear, and the card designs left a lot to be desired. Parts of the internet will say that the characters of Concord also doomed the game. Although this is a hard argument to believe, considering Valve’s own hero shooter, Deadlock, was released around the same time, to widespread excitement and an explosive player base. And Deadlock doesn’t even have a definitive character overview, even though it’s free to play.
But all this is to say that Concord is a black eye for the PlayStation brand, and not just because of its commercial failure. Sony’s handling of the entire situation has been catastrophic. It’s one thing to release a flop, but to have the game pulled from stores and player accounts barely weeks after launch Than Shutting down the studio it just acquired and scattering its developers into the wilderness of 2024’s already miserable games industry are the panicked decisions of a company completely unsure of where to go next.
These types of failures and subsequent panic are alien to modern Sony. Since the launch of the PlayStation 4, the gaming brand has become virtually unstoppable, releasing critically acclaimed game after game and beating its rivals in the console race. Nintendo has all but abandoned the console wars, choosing to be everyone’s second favorite console, while Xbox has spent years rebuilding itself in an attempt to get close to second place again. But as signature games of the single-player platform like God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man and The Last of Us racked up awards and sales, the gaming industry changed. Industry analysts like MIDiA may say that most gamers prefer single-player games, but the truth is that in 2023, 80% of gaming time was spent on just 66 games, most of which are online games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Call of Duty. and League of Legends. Live service is where the attention and money is focused.
It’s not hard to see why Sony would be interested in pursuing an aggressive strategy for live-service games that goes beyond just the potential profits. PlayStation teams like Naughty Dog and Insomniac spend nearly half a decade developing their AAA single-player games before release. So if Sony has a few live service games to distract players between the big AAA releases, then it suddenly has a pretty healthy looking release calendar that alternates between single-player game releases and live service content.
It was likely with this in mind that Sony acquired Destiny 2 developer Bungie in 2022, its most high-profile live-service studio purchase to date. That wasn’t all; Sony announced at the time that it planned to have ten live service games by the end of fiscal year 2025. Last year, seemingly in response to the behind-the-scenes realization of how difficult a goal was to achieve, Sony cut that number to just six. With the closure of Concord and numerous layoffs at Bungie, it’s clear that the PlayStation live services era is off to a rocky start. So what can Sony do about it?
First, it’s important to understand the current state of play and where Sony stands with its live service goals. PlayStation has canceled numerous online games, some officially confirmed, others only known through rumors and reports. Among them are Naughty Dogs’ The Last of Us PvP project, an online Spider-Man game, a live-service Twisted Metal, and Payback, a third-person Destiny spin-off.
As for the projects reportedly still in development, there’s Bungie’s Marathon (which just received an official developer update and appears safe at the moment) and two rumored Horizon games – one a co-op experience, the other an MMO . Sony also acquired Haven Studios in 2023, a new game studio founded by former Ubisoft veteran Jade Raymond. While Haven was acquired for its own upcoming AAA PvP project, Fairgames, Sony also planned the studio to bolster its other live-service efforts – until its closure, Haven helped Firewalk develop Concord.
To date, Sony’s most successful contribution to the live service genre is via a studio it doesn’t actually own. Arrowhead Studio’s hugely successful Helldivers 2 may show the PlayStation Studios logo when it starts up, but it will only be published by Sony. And while it launched with much fanfare, Helldivers’ recent updates have been less well received by the community, further indicating the long-term challenges PlayStation faces in the live services space.
The strategy here is muddled at best. The Last of Us and Spider-Man are both incredibly popular games for Sony, but to not even try to deliver on a multiplayer component when that’s such a big focus for PlayStation feels like a missed opportunity this generation. Meanwhile, Sony is also willing to release games from new studios like Firewalk for $40 in a genre dominated by premium, free-to-play experiences. It’s a huge gamble unless Sony believes the PlayStation brand is strong enough to support the very first game. from a relatively unknown studio. And without even giving Concord time to make any meaningful changes after launch, Sony is shutting down the studio completely.
In its official statement, Sony said it will “take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to enhance our live service capabilities to achieve future growth in this area.” But now that so much has gone wrong for Concord, it feels like Sony needs to look at everything it did with Concord and do the opposite.
Maybe don’t be so arrogant as to believe that the PlayStation name alone is enough to keep a game afloat in an oversaturated genre. And if a live service game doesn’t meet its goals a week after launch, maybe don’t pull it from stores right away. And if you’re in talks to join the PlayStation family, you can assure them that they won’t be shut down if their first game isn’t a hit.
Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.
