PlayStation’s Hermen Hulst Believes Concord Was “Insufficiently Differentiated” In A “Hypercompetitive Market”

PlayStation’s Hermen Hulst has finally revealed what he thinks happened to Concord.

Hulst is the CEO for PlayStation’s Studio Business Group division, managing the side of the company that runs their developers. In this capacity, he is the decision maker on the titles their studios have in development.

At this point, we don’t think it’s necessary to retell the story of Concord. But Hulst is a key figure in this story, as rumors spread from content creator Colin Moriarty that he was the one who decided to keep investing in the game until its release. Hulst reportedly saw the game as ‘the future of PlayStation’, a Star Wars-like IP that they could keep making future games and transmedia from.

Today, Hulst joined PlayStation President and CEO Hideaki Nishino and their SVP of Finance & Corporate Development Lynn Azar in a Fireside Chat, aka a Q&A, with their investors. In response to a question about Concord and Marathon, Hulst started talking frankly about how he saw Concord from his perspective.

Hulst said this:

Live service, we really see that as a great opportunity for us. But with this great opportunity are some unique challenges associated. So we have talked about our early success with Helldivers 2. We also faced some challenges with the release of Concord. I think that there’s some really good work actually went into that title, some really big effort.

But ultimately, that title entered into a hypercompetitive segment of the market. I think it was insufficiently differentiated to be able to resonate with players.  And so we have reviewed our processes in light of this to deeply understand how and why the title failed to meet expectations.

To ensure that we’re not gonna make the same mistakes again – like I said earlier – we’ve introduced much more rigorous processes for validating, re-validating, our creative, our commercial, our development assumptions and hypotheses. And we do that on a much more ongoing basis. That’s the plan that will ensure that we’re investing in the right opportunities, at the right time, all while maintaining much more predictable timelines.

Hulst’s statement did not corroborate the substance of the rumors about Concord and his involvement in it. So no, this is not some confession that he greenlit spending $ 400 million into the game or he thought it was going to be Sony’s Star Wars. But it was interesting that his account was not challenged by Nishino or Azar, who were there with him.

It seems that PlayStation as a whole really did believe that they did ‘some really good work’ with Concord. Hulst and PlayStation don’t think that live service is a mistake, and they definitely believe they will get their live service efforts right in the future. Unfortunately, that also means they’re still willing to take the risks that could lead to more layoffs and studio closures down the line. As ironic as this may sound, this does make us hope that they really can find their way into live service, at least to some extent.