Concord is still fresh in quite a few players’ minds. Sony hyped up the game and expected fans to take it in stride quickly. However, players were not fond of it. It failed big time, and while we’re still learning little about the failure, Sony president Hiroki Totoki issued a new statement about the game. Here’s what the COO and CFO had to say.
Thanks to a report from VGC, we’re learning a little about what Hiroki had to say. During a Q&A portion of an earnings call, the Sony president was asked about Concord since it was quickly shut down just over a week after it saw a release into the marketplace. Speaking through an interpreter, Hiroki noted that they are still very much in the process of learning.
They went on to say that with new IP, it’s tough to say how some of these games will do until you actually try them. However, since this failure, they learned to feature a few more gates early on with production. That would allow more internal evaluation on whether production should continue.
VGC noted that in the earnings call, Sony’s senior vice president for finance and IR, Sadahiko Hayakawa, also noted that they had a very successful live service game through Helldivers 2. With both, the folks at Sony could take the lessons learned and share them across their studios.
So, while it looks like Concord was a failure and wouldn’t see a return, the production offered some lessons for other studios within Sony to take note of. Hopefully, this means we’ll see more hits than misses going forward. But all we can do is wait and see if that happens. It’ll also be interesting to see if Sony continues to strive and bring out more live service games as we head into the upcoming year.
