Yesterday, Sony announced it’s shutting down Concord creator Firewalk Studios, whose game released in August and was taken offline less than two weeks later. CEO Hermen Hulst explained that “The PvP first person shooter genre is a competitive space that’s continuously evolving, and unfortunately, we did not hit our targets with this title.” But I wouldn’t put the blame on the genre or on Firewalk’s work–I’d put it squarely on Sony.
Was Concord a “good” game, however you define that? I didn’t play it, so can’t weigh in from personal experience, but it saw tremendously low player counts in its brief life, never a good thing for a multiplayer game. It set itself up for a challenge as a paid game in a space dominated by free-to-play, and its Overwatch-meets-Marvel-meets-Joss-Whedon cinematic reveal didn’t help matters.
After its awkward reveal, Concord found itself in a weird place in Sony’s stable. It was set to be part of Amazon’s Secret Level show (and, at least as of September, still is), signalling a kind of confidence in its world and characters, but at the same time Sony didn’t market it much. All of this was despite Sony purchasing Firewalk as part of its push into live service, scooping up the studio in April 2023 “to define a new generation of live service experiences for PlayStation gamers” before Firewalk had ever released a game. Kotaku reports that
The initial development deal for the game was just over $200 million, according to two sources familiar with the agreement but who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. But Kotaku understands that amount was not enough to cover the game’s entire development and did not include the purchase of Concord IP rights or Firewalk Studios itself, which Sony acquired only last year.
This investment and promotion of the game’s narrative stands at odds to how quickly Sony seemed to lose confidence in Concord. I wouldn’t say throwing the game, especially as a paid product, into the waters of the live service space was a good bet, but as part of a push into the genre, I would have expected Sony to stand behind it, or at least try to make the best out of the situation with its vast resources. Instead, Sony took the game offline–the possibility of it being revamped and coming back always felt like a pipe dream–and now it’s shuttered the studio. Hulst’s statement mentions the possibility of reassigning team members across PlayStation, and I sincerely hope it does, but I’m skeptical.
In its own statement about the shutdown, Firewalk listed its accomplishments. Among them were that it managed to
- Navigate growing a new startup into a team during a global pandemic: Firewalk was founded in 2018 and was very small for its first couple years, only entering full Production in 2022.
- Build a new, customized next-generation FPS engine in Unreal 4 -> 5, delivering top-tier gameplay feel, beautiful worlds, and a performant 60fps technical experience on a stable and scalable backend on PS5 and PC to hundreds of thousands of players in our beta.
- Manage an acquisition / integration while readying technical and preliminary tests.
- And ultimately ship and deliver a great FPS experience to players- even if it landed much more narrowly than hoped against a heavily consolidated market.
However the game performed with players, that’s a lot to be proud of. It’s certainly what you’d expect a studio you purchased to do, and it certainly seems like enough of a track record to keep a studio around to try again, especially if Sony is serious about its aim to, as Hulst wrote, “take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities.” But instead Sony has decided to dump the whole thing in the bin, letting Firewalk and its staff pay the price for Sony’s misguided push into a crowded space, failure to market, and inability/unwillingness/just plain refusal to support a studio it clearly once had a lot of faith in.
Firewalk wrote that the studio “began with the idea of bringing the joy of multiplayer to a larger audience… We took some risks along the way… and although some of these and other aspects of the IP didn’t land as we hoped, the idea of putting new things into the world is critical to pushing the medium forward.” If Firewalk had made this gamble under its own steam and with its own money, the shutdown might be an understandable end. But all of this happened under the live service fervor and via the deep pockets of a massive company. If this is anyone’s failure, and if anyone should be facing the consequences, it’s Sony.
