Since its disastrous launch, there has been a lot of talk about how Concord failed for PlayStation. It’s a fair conversation, but it’s not the only one we need to have to understand how we got here. We can’t ignore the failure of PlayStation Concord and its developers.

On Tuesday afternoon, Hermen Hulst announced that Concordwhich was shut down two weeks after its launch earlier this summer, I won’t come back. On top of that, he explained that Sony was going out of business Concord developer Firewalk Studios and mobile game developer Neon Koi. He cites the move as “part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen SIE’s Studio business.”

Just like I said when Xbox and Embracer laid off developers earlier in the year, this reasoning is not sufficient.

Sony Interactive Entertainment recruited these teams, and more, during an acquisition-friendly era for the video game industry. Sony believed it could carve its way to success in live services and mobile games. This was not the case, a major miscalculation on the part of Hulst and other leaders of SIE’s Studio Business Group. Instead of Sony’s top executives being blamed for this failure, it’s the developers who spent years working on these products. It’s another sign of ill health for an industry that underestimates the creators of its games.

Fool me once

PlayStation seemed very optimistic when it acquired Neon Koi (then known as Savage Game Studios) in 2022 and Firewalk Studios in 2023. For fire walkingHulst promised that the SIE acquisition would “grow our live services operations and deliver something truly special to gamers.” For Neon KoiHulst said the acquisition was part of a “continued drive to expand our audience and bring PlayStation to more people than ever before” through mobile gaming.

A few years later, none of these bets have paid off.

The live services space is more competitive than ever, and Concord I just didn’t have what it took to take on free hero shooting games like Monitoring 2 Or Valorant. Meanwhile, Neon Koi’s mobile game was apparently not “consistent with the pedigree of PlayStation Studios” nor capable of competing in a lucrative but highly competitive and cut-throat gaming space.

In hindsight, SIE’s acquisitions of Firewalk and Neon Koi were extremely risky bets. PlayStation bought studios it had never worked with in the hopes that it could break into areas where it hadn’t had as much success. The last year has shown that this approach doesn’t work, even for gaming industry giants like PlayStation and Xbox. Hulst says PlayStation will “learn lessons from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to ensure future growth. He also explains that “mobile remains a priority growth area” for PlayStation and that the company is “at the very beginning of our mobile efforts.”

These statements ring hollow.

Fool me twice

As a game publisher, Sony Interactive Entertainment has undoubtedly suffered Concordthe chances of success in several ways. SIE released Concord as a $40 premium game, a risky move given that it would be competing with several popular free alternatives. Some games that used a similar strategy on PlayStation were at least also released on Sony’s PS Plus service, free to subscribers for a short time to help build a player base. This strategy was never attempted here, even when the initial player count seemed dire. But the problems started before that. The game was revealed during Presentation of the inventory for the month of May in a confusing way that put its Marvel-like story and writing above all else instead of its filmmaking itself. First impressions are everything, and the one created by Sony for Concord didn’t tell a good story.

More importantly, Sony didn’t give Firewalk enough time to modify and refine the game after a beta build just before launch, which revealed several issues. A delay was unlikely to save the game, but the team never had a chance to take the comments to heart. Even though Firewalk delivered an imperfect game, the developers are not to blame for any of this. Concordmisfortunes.

Although less is known about what Neon Koi is working on, PlayStation is choosing to kill this studio and project rather than give the developers the space to succeed. This is why I doubt we will see any significant change from PlayStation after these studio closures. This is simply firing developers who worked on flawed initiatives from the start. This makes no difference to the people who made the decisions that ultimately led to these failures.

It’s not any game designer or programmer’s fault that PlayStation made bad bets that didn’t pay off. But now that Concord the launch will forever be treated as a disaster that tainted the PlayStation brand, the developers will be the only ones forced to carry this weight. Another cliché that Hulst leaned into when announcing these closures was that closing these studios and ceasing operations Concord was “the best way forward” for PlayStation. But for whom is this really the best path forward?

This is certainly not the best path for the 210 developers now unemployed, nor for the players who invested in Concord and I have no way of experiencing it again. No, this is just the best path forward for PlayStation’s bottom line as it scapegoats its failures and returns its focus to beloved single-player games like Yotei’s Ghost or safer live service betting like Marathon. It was probably the right decision to abandon game bankruptcies like Concordbut PlayStation’s choice to shut down Firewalk and Neon Koi outright is the result of poor leadership and a lack of accountability on the part of SIE. Never forget it.