Concord raises questions over Sony's live-service competence | Opinion

Sony's decision to withdraw Concord from the market and refund those who purchased it, made only two weeks after the launch of the game, feels both entirely unsurprising and yet somehow also a little shocking.

After the strongly negative reaction to the game when it headlined Sony's State of Play at the start of summer, the company seemed to have entirely lost faith in Firewalk's hero shooter. It got little marketing support, more or less disappearing from Sony's communications strategy. It's hard not to agree with the notion that the game was more or less 'sent out to die', although of course it remains quite possible that we'll see a retooled free-to-play version of it at some point down the line.

On some level, Sony's ambivalence about Concord is understandable. It's not a game that was conceived at Sony; the platform holder bought Firewalk Studios in 2023, and Concord came as part of the deal, as it was a title the studio had apparently been working on since its founding in 2018.

Many of Firewalk's senior staff were formerly at Bungie, which Sony had bought the previous year. It seems fairly likely that the studio was being bought for its expertise and experience, rather than for the game it was working on at the time.

Most of the decisions that sealed Concord's fate – in essence, the ones that led it to be an entirely unremarkable and forgettable live service title in a genre absolutely packed with heavy hitting competition – were probably made before Sony bought the studio. There's only so much blame that flows uphill here.

And yet; even if it's not to blame per se, there are absolutely some questions that flow uphill from this fiasco. This is still a game that went out with a PlayStation logo on it, under the auspices of Sony's studio system – which has, for the past decade, been an incredibly reliable label of quality.

Decisions that sealed Concord's fate were probably made before Sony bought the studio... And yet; there are absolutely some questions that flow uphill from this fiasco

PlayStation Studios has had misses before, of course, but there's a hell of a gap between having a few games that didn't perform well commercially, like Knack and Days Gone, and having a game go out under your label which has to be shut down within weeks and its purchases refunded.

Here's how we got here. At some point a few years ago, an executive decision was made that put PlayStation on a new path in software terms. Having established itself as having the premier studio system and being the lead platform for high-quality AAA titles, Sony executives decided that this did not suffice – quite possibly for perfectly reasonable economic reasons – and that what they really wanted instead was a nice big slice of the live-service cake being devoured by the kids next door at places like Epic and Hoyoverse.

The most obvious outcome of this pivot was that Sony spent billions of dollars purchasing Bungie. It also bought Firewalk, and partnered with other live service-focused companies like Arrowhead Games.

There have been successes from this approach – most notably Helldivers 2, which is one of the surprise hits of 2024 thus far, although it's fair to point out that it presently seems to be seriously struggling with making the transition from being a huge hit at launch to being a sustainable, long-term live service game.

Generally, though, this pivot has been… Chaotic, to put it mildly. Bungie, which Sony initially took a hands-off approach to, has seemingly been in a state of perma-crisis since the acquisition, most recently laying off around a fifth of its staff and spinning off a large team and their project to become a new studio directly managed by Sony; and now Firewalk's game has been pulled from sale in record time.

It's hard not to look at this and see Sony's expensive pivot into live service disintegrating in real time – and risking dragging down the reputation of PlayStation Studios in the process.

We can (and should) acknowledge, of course, that the timing here is pretty tough. Sony leaned hard into live service games when this looked like the shining future of the industry, it's now finally starting to launch games that were created or acquired at that point, but it's launching them into a world where consumers have very distinctly soured on live service concepts, and some very high profile titles have performed incredibly badly.

It's hard not to look at this and see Sony's expensive pivot into live service disintegrating in real time – and risking dragging down the reputation of PlayStation Studios in the process

It's easy for us to look at Sony's pivot with the benefit of hindsight and say they should have been more cautious; if Sony had had the sobering underperformance of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League as a point of reference back in 2020, they'd probably have been a lot more cautious too. Even with the best games in the world, live service is a hell of a tough sell right now, and the shockingly unappetising risk:reward profile of this business model is likely to claim quite a few more high-profile scalps in the next year or two.

Nonetheless, what Sony is meant to be incredibly good at, what it has reinvented the entire reputation and brand image of PlayStation around in the past decade or so, is running game studios.

Its position as a platform holder aside, it's arguably been in competition with Nintendo for the title of best and most consistent game publisher on the planet for quite some time – an extraordinary achievement for the people who have run PlayStation Studios over the years.

The company learned how to acquire the most talented studios and manage them in a way that allowed them to perform at their best. Most studios bought by Sony flourished, producing even better work under Sony's ownership than they had previously – which is, it's fair to say, not how studio acquisitions by large publishers generally work in this industry, with the life expectancy of golden-egg laying geese usually being extremely short.

How, then, did this company that is usually so expert in these things, manage to miss the signs that Bungie was on its way to being a basket case before spending billions on it; or fail to oversee and give input on Concord in a way that at least made the game interesting and appealing?

To be clear, I do think there's a solid game in Concord that could have been given a much better chance in the market – the minute to minute gameplay is great, as you'd expect from developers of this pedigree, but very few people will have had a chance to actually experience that, which is down to a series of bad choices that you'd expect a studio system of Sony's calibre to be able to identify and fix long before the game was presented to the public.

It doesn't seem unfair, under the circumstances, to ask the question: does Sony actually know what it's doing with live service games? In theory, it bought Bungie to bring on board expertise in live service – an acknowledgement that PlayStation Studios didn't have that expertise to begin with – but Bungie has ended up instead deeply wracked with internal issues.

The shockingly unappetising risk:reward profile of this business model is likely to claim quite a few more high-profile scalps in the next year or two

Firewalk, too, was full of people with experience of this field, and presumably purchased in an effort to boost Sony's live services efforts through that experience. Instead, it seems to have brought with it a game that showed up the cracks in the generally excellent PlayStation Studios system.

By most accounts from developers who work at Sony's studios, the company is pretty great at giving feedback; far from the conflicting or irrelevant notes that developers often gripe about getting from senior management elsewhere, Sony's input into its studios' work seems to be genuinely appreciated for helping development teams to push their games to a higher level of quality, rather than demanding changes that reduce creativity and flare in their titles.

With Concord, though, that clearly didn't happen; is that simply because Sony doesn't have the knowledge, experience, and insight required to do that for live service games? Given that it bought Bungie and Firewalk precisely to try to acquire that knowledge, that wouldn't be too surprising, if true.

I don't know exactly where that leaves Sony. The executive decision to focus Sony on live-service has left it deeply committed to a genre it doesn't seem to understand, with its efforts to buy expertise panning out poorly, and with the genre itself seemingly in slow motion collapse around them.

Live service has always been a ruthless arena, allowing only a tiny handful of games to succeed and brutally punishing all others. With high profile titles in this space failing regularly, the odds have only become worse. The risk is that this could create stresses within PlayStation Studios, pulling the company away from its core competencies and forcing it to try to manage the development of games it barely understands.

The saving grace, of course, is that the resources that went into Concord aren't entirely zero-sum – Sony is a big enough publisher to keep lots of irons in the fire. Being forced to drop the game that headlined State of Play only a few months ago is humiliating, and does have opportunity costs associated with it.

If Astro Bot achieves the commercial success that eluded Concord, perhaps there's a lesson there that will be hard to ignore

But on the other hand, a few days after Concord was cancelled, Sony launched Astro Bot, arguably its most anticipated title for this quarter and, it's worth noting, a classic single-player title that relies heavily on nostalgia for PlayStation's great single-player games of old. If that achieves the commercial success that eluded Concord, perhaps there's a lesson there that will be hard to ignore – although I do fear that there's a certain breed of executive that will take that lesson to be "we need an Astro Bot live service game."

Ultimately, every publisher experimenting with live service is doing it for the same reason – game development is increasingly expensive, game revenues are largely flat, and new ways to build revenue are essential if these trends are sustained. It is worrying, though, that so many companies have decided that the only way to square this circle is to try to bottle lightning and create the next Fortnite – an approach that looks increasingly like putting all your savings into lottery tickets rather than index funds.

For Sony in particular, the decisions it has made in its live-service pivot have so far mostly turned out badly. I don't expect the company to pull back entirely from that pivot by any means, but surely at this stage some strategic reconsideration of its approach to date would not go amiss.