After years of console domination, we’re starting to see cracks in the PlayStation brand as it tries to brute force its way towards live-service supremacy. There’s no clearer example of this than the high-profile failure of Concord and the closing of Firewalk Studio.
This week, PlayStation announced that it was shuttering Firewalk Studio, a developer founded in 2018 that Sony acquired just last year. The reason for the acquisition and the closure are the same: Concord, a live-service PvP hero shooter released on both PS5 and PC, developed by creatives who cut their teeth on games like Destiny and Call of Duty.
To be perfectly frank, Concord bombed. According to SteamDB data, player counts on PC never broke 1000, and estimated sales figures across both PS5 and Steam were abysmal. At the time of its disastrous launch, I laid out reasons why Concord failed to land, including the eight years it spent in development that caused it to completely miss the hero shooter trend that was kickstarted by Team Fortress 2 in 2007 and peaked with Overwatch in 2016:
“Knowing the cost and development time required for a AAA online games, studios have to assess, predict and/or simply guess as to what will be the next big hit. What games will succeed in four, five, six years time if we begin developing it right now? Will the audience still care for that kind of game when we’re finally ready to release it? It practically requires the services of a fortune-teller to get the answer right.”
Basically, if you start making a game based on what’s popular now, you’re probably already too late.
That quite straightforward mistake is compounded by Concord’s exorbitant development cost. The vast budget that allowed for PlayStation’s characteristic best-in-class visuals and a library of cinematic cutscenes we’ll never see meant that while rivals were released free-to-play, Sony chose to sell the game for $40. Combined with low consumer awareness and tons of quality, free alternatives, Concord’s price put it at a massive — and, as it turns out, fatal — disadvantage.
Content wise, it’s hard to say that Concord was fully baked when it launched. The character kits were awkward at best, the systems — which Firewalk said mixes elements of fighting games and card games — were mostly unclear, and the map designs had much to be desired. Parts of the internet will say that Concord’s characters also doomed the game. Though this is a hard argument to believe considering Valve’s own hero shooter, Deadlock, was released at around the same time to widespread excitement and an exploding player count. And Deadlock doesn’t even have a finalized character roster, though it is free-to-play.
But all this is to say that Concord is a black eye on the PlayStation brand, and not just because of its commercial failure. Sony’s handling the entire situation has been catastrophic. It’s one thing to release a flop, but pulling the game from stores and player accounts barely weeks after launch, and then shutting down the studio it just acquired and scattering its developers into the wilds of 2024’s already miserable games industry, are the panicked decisions of a company totally unsure of where to go next.
This kind of failure and subsequent panic is alien to modern Sony. Since the launch of the PlayStation 4, its gaming brand has been nearly unstoppable, releasing critically-acclaimed game after game and defeating its rivals in the console race. Nintendo has all but exited the console wars, choosing instead to be everyone’s second console of choice, while Xbox has spent years rebuilding itself in an attempt to get close to being second place again. But while games the platform’s signature single-player games like God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man, and The Last of Us racked up awards and sales, the game industry changed. Industry analysts like MIDiA may say that most gamers prefer single-player games, but the truth is that in 2023, 80% of game time was spent on just 66 games, most of which are online games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, Call of Duty, and League of Legends. Live-service is where the attention and dollars are at.
It’s not hard to see why Sony would be interested in pursuing an aggressive live-service games strategy, then, beyond just the potential profits. PlayStation’s first-party teams like Naughty Dog and Insomniac spend nearly half a decade developing their AAA single-player games before they’re released. So, if Sony has a few live-service games to keep players distracted in between major AAA releases, then suddenly it’s got a pretty healthy looking release calendar that alternates between single-player game releases and live-service content.
It was probably with this in mind that Sony acquired Destiny 2 developer Bungie in 2022, its most high-profile live-service studio acquisition to date. That wasn’t all; at the time Sony announced that it planned to have 10 live-service games running by the end of the 2025 fiscal year. Last year, seemingly in response to a behind-the-scenes realization of how difficult a goal that was to achieve, Sony revised that number down to just six. With the shuttering of Concord and numerous rounds of layoffs at Bungie, it’s clear that the PlayStation live-service era is off to a rocky start. So what can Sony do about it?
First, it’s important to understand the current state of play and where Sony’s at in its live-service goals. PlayStation has canceled numerous online games, some officially confirmed, others only known via rumors and reports. Among them are Naughty Dogs’ The Last of Us PvP project, an online Spider-Man game, a live-service Twisted Metal, and Payback, a third-person Destiny spinoff.
As for the projects still reportedly in development, there’s Bungie’s Marathon (which just received an official developer update and, for the moment, seems safe) as well as two rumored Horizon games – one a co-op experience, the other an MMO. Sony also acquired Haven Studios in 2023, a new game studio started by former Ubisoft veteran Jade Raymond. While Haven was purchased for its own upcoming AAA PvP project, Fairgames, Sony also planned for the studio to help bolster its other live-service efforts – until its closing, Haven aided Firewalk in development of Concord.
So far, Sony’s most successful contribution to the live-service genre is via a studio it doesn’t actually own. Arrowhead Studio’s massively successful Helldivers 2, may show the PlayStation Studios logo when it boots up, but it is only published by Sony. And, while it launched to great fanfare, Helldivers’ recent updates have been less well-received by the community, further indicating the long-term challenges PlayStation faces in the live-service arena.
The strategy here is muddled at best. The Last of Us and Spider-Man are both incredibly popular games for Sony, but to not even try to deliver on a multiplayer component when that’s such a big focus for PlayStation this generation feels like a missed opportunity. Meanwhile, Sony is also willing to release games from new studios like Firewalk for $40 in a genre dominated by premium, free-to-play experiences is a huge gamble, unless Sony believes that the PlayStation brand is strong enough to bolster the very first game from a relatively unknown studio. And without even giving Concord time at making any kind of meaningful change after the launch, Sony shutters the studio outright.
In its official statement, Sony says it will “take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.” But with so much having gone wrong for Concord, it feels like Sony should look at everything it did with Concord and do the opposite.
Maybe don’t be so arrogant as to believe that the PlayStation name alone is enough to prop up a game in an over-saturated genre. And if a live-service game fails to meet its targets a week after launch, maybe don’t immediately pull it from stores. And, for any prospective developer in talks to join the PlayStation family, maybe assure them that they won’t be shut down the moment after their first game isn’t a hit.
Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.
