The flash-in-the-pan launch and then nearly immediate cancellation of Firewalk Studios’ Concord remains one of the more startling game disasters of the year, and it’s one that both the industry and publisher Sony are still digesting as evidenced by its earnings call this past Friday.
Sony President Hiroki Totoki broke down the spectacular crash of what was once a promising title by saying that it was caused by a lack of communication between teams, too many projects heaped on the shoulder of the developer, and the failure of the company to check in with the project.
“Currently, we are still in the process of learning and basically with regards to IP you don’t know the result until you actually try it. So for us for our reflection probably we need to have a lot of gates including user testing and user evaluation and the timing of such gates we need to bring them forward and we should have done those gates much earlier than we did,” Totoki said through a translator.
Concord launched in late August on PC and PlayStation 5 as a live service team shooter only to have the plug pulled on September 6th. The title’s studio, Firewalk, was also closed down by the end of October and its 150+ developers cut loose.
