Concord studio shuts down as Sony sunsets the troubled shooter

digitaltrends.com:

Sony announced that it’s officially sunsetting Concord and closing its developer Firewalk Studios after a disastrous launch that led to it taking the game offline after just two weeks.

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), which acquired Firewalk in 2023, revealed in an email sent out to employees on Tuesday that it’s shutting down the studio, along with mobile developer Neon Koi, in order to “strengthen SIE’s Studio Business.” That means two studios acquired by Sony over the past two years have been closed.

While CEO Hermen Hulst says that there was a lot to like about Concord, it did not meet expectations and could not compete in the PvP first-person shooter space, which is full of competitors like Overwatch 2. Hulst added that Sony will “take the lessons learned from Concord and apply it to future projects. “We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options,” he wrote. “After much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio. I want to thank all of Firewalk for their craftsmanship, creative spirit, and dedication.”

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Firewalk Studios posted a statement on its X (formerly Twitter) account laying out its accomplishments, including a clarification that Concord started full production in 2022 since the studio spent years as a small startup. It called Concord a “great FPS experience to players — even if it landed much more narrowly than hoped against a heavily consolidated market.”

“We took some risks along the way – marrying aspects of card battlers and fighting games with first-person-shooters – and although some of these and other aspects of the IP didn’t land as we hoped, the idea of putting new things into the world is