It’s been a week since Concord’s launch, and the industry is already estimating the extent of the launch for Firewalk, and their owner, Sony.
As reported by IGN, Simon Carless at GameDiscoverCo estimates that the game sold 25,000 units overall. 10,000 of those sales were on Steam, and 15,000 were on PlayStation 5. These are poor numbers, but an even stranger picture emerges from other analytics.
Circana’s Matt Piscatella shared that Concord ranked 147th in US PS5 daily active players across all titles last August 26, with fewer than 0.2% of Monday’s active PS5 players playing the game. But if these estimates add up with the other metrics, there are considerably more people who bought Concord and did not play it on both platforms. After all, if there were really 10,000 people who bought the game on Steam, why did we not see those 9,000 + buyers show up to actually play the game?
As for the reasons they believe that the game failed, the consensus mainly comes to three points. Sony did not spend the required amount to market a completely new game, the $ 40 price point is a steep barrier in a free-to-play genre, and it doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from its peers.
As we ourselves put it, Concord’s launch was a historic failure for the industry. The only reason we did not outright call it the biggest failure that Sony, or the industry, has ever seen, is we don’t have enough data as a point of comparison for other missteps. For example, the PlayStation 3’s Cell processor, at a cost of $ 400 million, was possibly a bigger loss for Sony. And there are no lack of failures that doomed other game companies, such as the Neo Geo 64. These could be considered bigger failures in impact, if not in sheer cost.
But we may soon get an official assessment to the extent of Concord’s failure, as Sony Group’s Chief Financial Officer, Hiroki Totoki, happens to also be the Chairman of PlayStation. And in the same way that Totoki was asked point blank to explain the situation with Bungie in an investor’s call, he will definitely have to answer for Firewalk Studios and Concord, if Sony doesn’t address it directly themselves.
If there are gamers who think this will be a good sign for Sony, because they will have to go back to making only single player games again, they are mistaken. The extent that this loss will affect Sony can lead to choices like cancelling or downgrading games that are in production now, raising the price of the PlayStation 5 Pro, and everything that involves keeping them a viable business. We can’t do anything now but wait and see how everything that has happened will add up in the end.
