Unfortunately, for Concord, it seems the writing was on the wall. In the wake of Concord‘s catastrophic commercial failure, Sony has decided to shut Firewalk Studios down. The decision was confirmed on Sony Interactive’s official website. The company released an internal email detailing why that route was taken.
“We consistently evaluate our games portfolio and status of our projects to ensure we are meeting near and long-term business priorities. As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen SIE’s Studio Business, we have had to make a difficult decision relating to two of our studios – Neon Koi and Firewalk Studios,” the email states.
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“Regarding Firewalk, as announced in early September, certain aspects of Concord were exceptional, but others did not land with enough players. And as a result, we took the game offline. We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options. After much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio. I want to thank all of Firewalk for their craftsmanship, creative spirit and dedication.”
sony shuts down the dev team behind ‘concord’
Reported by Kotaku, the initial development cost for Concord was over $200 million. However, that budget still wasn’t nearly enough to cover the overall costs of the project. Additionally, that budget “did not include the purchase of Concord IP rights or Firewalk Studios itself, which Sony acquired only last year.”
The game was ultimately taken offline less than a month after its release. Furthermore, analysts took stock of what might’ve went wrong — what could’ve possibly led to such a horrible outcome for Concord. As IGN reports, the game suffered from “poor marketing, a high price point, and most critically, a lack of differentiation in an oversaturated genre.”
So, there you have it. Not one — but two studio closures. Poor Neon Koi’s closure was buried beneath the “bigger disappointment.” The “mobile action game” that team was working on will never see the light of day. In many ways, Concord ended up being rotten luck for the developers. It wasn’t a matter of the game necessarily being “bad.” It wasn’t even a series of factors they had any direct control over. Bad timing and a lack of external faith — that’s all it took. Another passionate team struck down in an increasingly devastating year for game developers.
