Sony Closes Concord Developer Firewalk Studios, Permanently Sunsets Game
Less than two months after Sony took its live service hero-shooter Concord offline after a disastrous launch, the company announced Tuesday it was shutting down developer Firewalk Studios and closing the book on the infamous game. Firewalk employees will depart Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) and the PlayStation parent will “permanently sunset” the game, admitting that it did not hit its targets with the multiplayer title. In addition to shuttering the Concord developer, Sony said it was also closing mobile games developer Neon Koi.
Firewalk's closure marks the end of an ignominious chapter for Sony, that saw the company launch Concord on August 23 to the sound of crickets. The $40 hero-shooter failed to find an audience in a competitive genre full of free-to-play options, peaking out at a dismal 697 concurrent players on Steam before it was scrubbed from PlayStation and PC storefronts and taken offline less than two weeks after release.
“We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options,” Hermen Hulst, CEO of Studio Business Group at SIE, said in an internal email to employees. “After much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio.”
Hulst said certain aspects of Concord did not appeal to enough players, despite some of its “exceptional” qualities. “The PvP first person shooter genre is a competitive space that's continuously evolving, and unfortunately, we did not hit our targets with this title. We will take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.”
In an X (formerly Twitter) post Tuesday, Firewalk Studios signed off one last time, hailing its development team as “truly world-class".
“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
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