Firewalk Studios Officially Closing Following Concord's Disastrous Release and Subsequent Shutdown

ign.com:

Sony is shuttering Firewalk Studios in the wake of its disastrous release of Concord, the PS5 shooter that lasted less than two weeks before being shuttered. The news was first reported by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

Firewalk Studios' closure follows the reported departure of director Ryan Ellis, who stepped down after Concord was taken offline. Sony Interactive Entertainment publicly posted the internal email from Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst with a statement on the closure, which you can read below. Hulst wrote that SIE had "spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options," but ultimately decided to sunset the studio, which it had acquired in April 2023. The email also announces SIE's decision to close Neon Koi, a German studio working on a mobile action game.

A post on LinkedIn from Firewalk Studios said that the studio "began with the idea of bringing the joy of multiplayer to a larger audience." It notes that it began as a new startup in 2018, built a customized FPS engine, and more. The post goes on, "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 critical to pushing the medium forward.

"The talent at Firewalk and the level of individual craft is truly world-class, and teams within Sony Interactive Entertainment and across the industry will be fortunate to work with them. Please reach out to Recruiting at PlayStation for inquiries, and thank you to all the very many teams, partners and fans who supported us along the way."

First released on August 23 for PS5 and PC, Concord struggled at the outset with low concurrents before Sony suddenly announced it was pulling the plug on September 3. We wrote in our postmortem of why Sony's hero shooter failed, "The cost of coming late to the party means you must bring something new to the table.