Sony on Concord’s failure: “you don’t know the result until you actually try it”

Concord released earlier this Summer, marking the biggest flop in PlayStation history – with the live-service Hero Shooter being delisted in less than two weeks, and the devs (Firewalk Studios) being completely shut down shortly after. Sony has now officially commented on this failure, claiming that “With regards to new IP, of course, you don't know the result until you actually try it.”

As part of Sony’s latest fiscal earnings report, the President, COO and CFO ‘Hiroki Totoki’ spoke to investors on the failures of Concord, saying (as transcribed by VGC):

“With regards to new IP, of course, you don't know the result until you actually try it. We probably need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates. And then we need to bring them forward, and we should have done those gates much earlier than we did.”

Discussing the monumental failure further, Totoki continued, “Also, we have a siloed organisation, so going beyond the boundaries of those organisations in terms of development, and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother.”

One of the learnings Sony seems to be taking with Concord is to do with the timing of its release, stating “going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we do have many different windows. And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalisation, so that we can maximise our performance in terms of title launches.”

The massive failure of Concord contrasted clearly with one of Sony’s other first-party titles – that being the single-player 3D platformer Astro Bot – which has proven to be a success for the console maker.

Given just how significant the failure of Concord has been, it will be interesting to see exactly how Sony changes its strategy on all fronts in the future.

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KitGuru says: Did you get the chance to try Concord? Was it THAT bad in your opinion? Let us know down below.

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