Sony Talks About Lessons Learned From Concord Including Earlier Testing And Working With "Proven IPs" A Bit More

Following the super-fast closure of hero shooter Concord and the subsequent closing of Firewalk Studios, you just know the whole mess was going to come up on the next financial presentation for Sony. With outlets estimating Sony's investment at numbers as high as $200 million and the game not making it mere weeks after launch, investors might just have a few questions.

Would Sony "learn" from Concord? If so, would they learn the right lessons?

Well, diving into the investor presentation and Q&A call, I'd personally put the answers at "yes, and mostly no" in my book.

When it comes to Concord specifically, Sony Senior VP Sadahiko Hayakawa reflected on that launch compared to the stunning success of Helldivers 2 saying, ""We launched two live-service games this year. Helldivers 2 was a huge hit, while Concord ended up being shut down. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot from both. We intend to share the lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management as well as the process of continually adding expanded content and scaling the service after its release so as to strengthen our development management system."

CFO/COO Hiroki Totoki also expressed the importance of earlier user testing in conjunction with other "gates" the studio could be using to improve products. "We probably need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates. And then we need to bring them forward, and we should have done those gates much earlier than we did."

Sure, those are both lovely lessons to learn. However, there are multiple studios that will not get that chance since Sony shut them down...including Concord's own Firewalk Studios.

While the company will continue to focus on some live-service offerings, it also takes away what I think is another "bad lesson" and stated a focus on "proven IPs." From the report, "We intend to build an optimal title portfolio during the current mid-range plan period that combines single-player games, which are our strength, and which have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP, with live service games that pursue upside while taking on a certain amount of risk upon release."

I'm not saying that all of their lessons aren't valid to some degree, but there is WAY more at play here that isn't covered under the "see, when you work with an unknown/new IP this is what can happen." Sure, the IP for Concord was boring to me (and many others), but that wasn't the reason this flopped. Hell it may barely make the top 3 reasons.

Either way, I hate lessons that get summed up with the idea of "see this is why you don't take risks" in an industry that requires risks be taken to move the art forward. Maybe that's just me, though.