Sony Acknowledges, Explains Concord’s Failure, And Future Changes

Concord will go down as one of the biggest video game disasters of all time, which is no exaggeration given its years of development time, $200 million budget and the fact that it shut down completely with mass refunds given out just two weeks after its launch. There was some talk that maybe it could return reworked as a free-to-play offering, but it will not, and Sony closed its studio last month.

Now, Sony is talking about the failure of Concord and how they will try to avoid situations like this in the future. Here’s the relevant comment from Sony’s earnings call yesterday:

“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.”

This feels like a lot of words to say “we made a game and should have made sure anyone actually wanted to play it,” as from moment one Concord received an overwhelmingly negative reception due to A) its general aesthetic and B) the revelation that it would be yet another 5v5 hero shooter in a ballooned market. The cinematic trailer for Concord, which debuted five months ago, has a 7K/38K like/dislike ratio. The gameplay trailer released simultaneously had an 8K/82K ratio instead. From that moment it should have been pretty clear it did not have much of a chance, and it’s hard to understand how no one caught how unappealing the game would be inside Firewalk or Sony, which is what Sony seems to be saying will now change with future analysis.

Sony has many more live games coming, a high profile one being Marathon from Bungie, allegedly out next year but probably more like 2026. That game has been undergoing a lot of community playtesting and its aesthetic is one of its biggest strengths, but it's trying to carve out a AAA extraction shooter space that may or may not exist.

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I would be more worried about a Sony project like Fairgame$, already battling that terrible title, and getting the same “we feel good about this” buzz from inside Sony that…Concord also got ahead of launch. But the game does not look appealing at baseline, and if we are using YouTube as a barometer again, its reveal trailer from over a year ago has a 4K/50K like dislike ratio, even worse than what we saw from Concord. And no, it just doesn’t look very good. We also don’t really have any idea what it’s current status is.

Clearly Sony can produce live hits like Helldivers, but it cannot afford another disaster like Concord. But truly, there has never been a disaster like Concord.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.