Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) stated on Tuesday that it was closing developer Firewalk Studios and ending development of the game Concord, less than two months after the firm put the live online hero-shooter offline following a botched debut.
SIE chief executive, Hermen Hulst, confirmed the decision in a statement.
Sony’s PlayStation game division has had a very eventful year.
Among the highlights are the debut of the PS5 Pro (available for pre-order on Amazon for $699), which will be available next month, and the release of Astro Bot, a first-party game for the PS5.
However, there have been notable misses, with the largest one being Concord, a PvP first-person shooter.
“The PvP first-person shooter genre is a competitive space that’s continuously evolving, and unfortunately, we did not hit our targets with [Concord],” wrote Hulst in a company-wide email. “We will take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.”
While Sony did not mention it officially, the decision to close the studio could have been influenced by the large sum of money purportedly spent on the game’s development.
In addition to Firewalk Studios, Sony has announced that it will close Neon Koi (previously Savage Game Studios), which it acquired in August 2022.
Neon Koi was working on a AAA mobile live-service action game for Sony, but it was shut down before it could even release the first game.
The mobile action game will not be released.
Hulst concluded that certain components of Concord did not appeal to enough players, despite some of its “exceptional” features.
We earlier reported that Sony Music Group, which owns popular record labels like Epic, RCA, and Columbia, has begun sending formal letters to over 700 streaming platforms and generative AI companies including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, forbidding them from web scraping, text or data mining, or any other use of SMG content without explicit licencing agreements