PlayStation Urgently Needs To Rethink Its Live-Service Strategy After Concord's Failure

ign.com:

After years of console domination, we’re starting to see cracks in the PlayStation brand as it tries to brute force its way towards live-service supremacy. There’s no clearer example of this than the high-profile failure of Concord and the closing of Firewalk Studio.

This week, PlayStation announced that it was shuttering Firewalk Studio, a developer founded in 2018 that Sony acquired just last year. The reason for the acquisition and the closure are the same: Concord, a live-service PvP hero shooter released on both PS5 and PC, developed by creatives who cut their teeth on games like Destiny and Call of Duty.

To be perfectly frank, Concord bombed. According to SteamDB data, player counts on PC never broke 1000, and estimated sales figures across both PS5 and Steam were abysmal. At the time of its disastrous launch, I laid out reasons why Concord failed to land, including the eight years it spent in development that caused it to completely miss the hero shooter trend that was kickstarted by Team Fortress 2 in 2007 and peaked with Overwatch in 2016:

“Knowing the cost and development time required for a AAA online games, studios have to assess, predict and/or simply guess as to what will be the next big hit. What games will succeed in four, five, six years time if we begin developing it right now? Will the audience still care for that kind of game when we’re finally ready to release it? It practically requires the services of a fortune-teller to get the answer right.”

Basically, if you start making a game based on what’s popular now, you’re probably already too late.

That quite straightforward mistake is compounded by Concord’s exorbitant development cost. The vast budget that allowed for PlayStation’s characteristic best-in-class visuals and a library of cinematic cutscenes we’ll never see meant that while rivals were released free-to-play, Sony chose to sell the game for $40. Combined with low consumer awareness and tons of quality, free alternatives, Concord’s price