Concord raises questions over Sony's live-service competence | Opinion
Sony's decision to withdraw Concord from the market and refund those who purchased it, made only two weeks after the launch of the game, feels both entirely unsurprising and yet somehow also a little shocking.
After the strongly negative reaction to the game when it headlined Sony's State of Play at the start of summer, the company seemed to have entirely lost faith in Firewalk's hero shooter. It got little marketing support, more or less disappearing from Sony's communications strategy. It's hard not to agree with the notion that the game was more or less 'sent out to die', although of course it remains quite possible that we'll see a retooled free-to-play version of it at some point down the line.
On some level, Sony's ambivalence about Concord is understandable. It's not a game that was conceived at Sony; the platform holder bought Firewalk Studios in 2023, and Concord came as part of the deal, as it was a title the studio had apparently been working on since its founding in 2018.
Many of Firewalk's senior staff were formerly at Bungie, which Sony had bought the previous year. It seems fairly likely that the studio was being bought for its expertise and experience, rather than for the game it was working on at the time.
Most of the decisions that sealed Concord's fate – in essence, the ones that led it to be an entirely unremarkable and forgettable live service title in a genre absolutely packed with heavy hitting competition – were probably made before Sony bought the studio. There's only so much blame that flows uphill here.
And yet; even if it's not to blame per se, there are absolutely some questions that flow uphill from this fiasco. This is still a game that went out with a PlayStation logo on it, under the auspices of Sony's studio system – which has, for the past decade, been an incredibly reliable label of quality.
PlayStation Studios has had misses before, of course, but there's a hell of a gap between having a few games that didn't perform well commercially,
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