Sony shuts down Firewalk Studios and cancels Concord

Despite all signs pointing towards a rough reception, Sony forged ahead with Firewalk Studios' first game, Concord, and released it in August. Due to extremely low sales, Sony took the game offline within two weeks of release. Now, it is shutting down Firewalk and scrapping Concord entirely. 

Sony announced today that it is shutting down Firewalk Studios in a message shared on its official website earlier today. In that post, PlayStation Studios head, Hermen Hult, said: “We consistently evaluate our games portfolio and status of our projects to ensure we are meeting near and long-term business priorities. As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen SIE’s Studio Business, we have had to make a difficult decision relating to two of our studios – Neon Koi and Firewalk Studios.”

Neon Koi was a mobile game studio, but the real big closure here is Firewalk. Sony acquired the studio just over one year ago, in April 2023, purely off of the back of the Concord pitch. This all comes just days after it was spotted that Concord was actively being updated on Steam, so presumably, the studio thought it was still moving ahead with relaunching the game.

It was previously rumoured that Firewalk Studios operated with a bit of a toxic positivity problem behind the scenes, leading to little internal criticism of the game being made. While Concord didn't have awful gameplay, it looked a bit too much like Destiny PvP meets Marvel. It was an uninspired concept that failed to garner much fan affection due to the already saturated market.

It was thought for a while that Concord could be reworked as a free-to-play game, which would give it a better shot of finding an audience compared to its original $40 price tag. However, as Jason Schreier points out, that would still cost more money and take more time. It seems to us that executives at Sony had lost faith that the project could ever recoup its losses.

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KitGuru Says: Firewalk Studios suffered the same fate as LawBreakers back in 2017. Within months of that game's failed launch, the studio behind it was closed. It is unclear if any employees from Firewalk will be moving to other studios or projects within Sony Interactive Entertainment. My assumption would be that this will unfortunately result in more lay-offs, adding to the thousands of other job losses across game studios in 2024. 

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