PlayStation Studios boss says changes introduced to avoid another Concord-like embarrassment

[midian182]

Recap: When it comes to major failures, there are epic fails, and then there's Concord. The game was only available for 14 days before being shut down over an embarrassingly low player count and sales. PlayStation Studios' boss says it's an experience he has learned from, and the company will be altering its development process to avoid a similar disaster.

PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst told The Financial Times that the gaming giant has introduced new measures to mitigate another failure as expensive and humiliating as Concord.

As a reminder, Concord was in development for around eight years and is rumored to have had a budget between $200 million and $400 million.

The multiplayer FPS hero shooter was released for PS5 and Windows on August 23, 2024, but after receiving poor reviews, selling just 25,000 units, and experiencing Steam concurrent player counts below 700, Sony pulled the $40 title from sale on September 6, just two weeks after it launched.

Hulst says that PlayStation is implementing changes as a result of the Concord debacle to spot any potential issues during development. "I don't want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply," he explained.

"We have since put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing in very many different ways," Hulst said. "The advantage of every failure [...] is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is."

According to the FT, which spoke to several Sony studio heads, these new measures include more of a focus on group testing, extra communication and learning between Sony teams, and building a closer relationship between the studios' top executives.

Jason Connell, art director at Ghost of Yōtei studio Sucker Punch, said "If we're heading towards a giant landmine, like there's another studio making exactly the same game, that's good information." One of the many problems with Concord was that it failed to stand out in a marketplace already crowded with multiplayer, live-service shooters.

Another change is Sony cutting back on the number of releases in this genre. In 2022, Sony Interactive Entertainment's then-president Jim Ryan said PlayStation planned to release 12 new live-service games before the end of the 2025 fiscal year. But Hulst says Sony is no longer focused on launching a slew of these games, adding that "a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities" is more important.

While Concord was a nightmare, Astro Bot has been a commercial and critical success, receiving numerous GOTY awards. Hulst says he wants to imitate this winning formula of turning IPs into increasingly bigger and more popular franchises with each new release.

"We take a very intentional approach to IP creation," he said. "Understanding how a new concept can turn into an iconic franchise for PlayStation, that can then again become a franchise for people beyond gaming."

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PlayStation Studios boss says changes introduced to avoid another Concord-like embarrassment

 

[m4a4]

What? Are they going to consult actual gamers earlier in the dev cycle this time around?

Anyone grounded in realty could tell Concord was not made for the vast majority of gamers (and thus had no audience). And then making it a paid title made it all the more short-term lol

 

[Axeia]

Somehow, despite dozens of people working on it for nearly a decade not a single one spoke up despite obvious shortcomings.

The biggest and easiest to fix one being the character design. People want to play attractive characters, not gender neutral blobs. When you take such a neutral approach and every single character looks incredibly bland you lose an immense amount of initial appeal. Not saying that throwing in some sex appeal and a more vibrant color palette would have saved the game but it definitely wouldn't have hurt.
If you try to cater to everyone you cater to no one.

Overwatch led the charge in showing what worked, Marvel Rivals doubled down on it and dethroned it.

The kind of budget that went to this game could have resulted in a genre heavy hitter or even genre defining juggernaut (that's about the same budget as Cyberpunk 2077!). Instead they got absolutely nothing and disbanded the studio behind it. Makes you wonder where the money really went to, were there that many incompetent people working on it or did they simply embezzle a good chunk of it.

 

[toooooot]

Somehow, despite dozens of people working on it for nearly a decade not a single one spoke up despite obvious shortcomings.

They call it toxic positivity, you have to stay positive even if there is a dire need to be negative

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Somehow, despite dozens of people working on it for nearly a decade not a single one spoke up despite obvious shortcomings.

The biggest and easiest to fix one being the character design. People want to play attractive characters, not gender neutral blobs. When you take such a neutral approach and every single character looks incredibly bland you lose an immense amount of initial appeal. Not saying that throwing in some sex appeal and a more vibrant color palette would have saved the game but it definitely wouldn't have hurt.
If you try to cater to everyone you cater to no one.

Overwatch led the charge in showing what worked, Marvel Rivals doubled down on it and dethroned it.

The kind of budget that went to this game could have resulted in a genre heavy hitter or even genre defining juggernaut (that's about the same budget as Cyberpunk 2077!). Instead they got absolutely nothing and disbanded the studio behind it. Makes you wonder where the money really went to, were there that many incompetent people working on it or did they simply embezzle a good chunk of it.

- The answer to this question is always that it was some c-suite exec's "vision" or some ****. I don't understand the need to blame the ground level folks that are asked to churn out textures/concept art/levels/etc.

They are only ever seeing a small piece of the overall project. How does the guy designing the wall textures for map 10 know what the devops or gameplay team are doing?

Put the blame where it belongs: the creative directors, the project sponsors, etc who can see from a 10000 ft level that they're cooking a turd and just plow on ahead to plating.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

- The answer to this question is always that it was some c-suite exec's "vision" or some ****. I don't understand the need to blame the ground level folks that are asked to churn out textures/concept art/levels/etc.

They are only ever seeing a small piece of the overall project. How does the guy designing the wall textures for map 10 know what the devops or gameplay team are doing?

Put the blame where it belongs: the creative directors, the project sponsors, etc who can see from a 10000 ft level that they're cooking a turd and just plow on ahead to plating.

They're not the only ones to blame.

Those game devs that chose to work underpaid for 8 years on concord all knew the stinker they were making, yet kept at it. We know that game development is chock full of wannabe influencers with strong political viewpoints.

The toxic positivity that banned any criticism of the game did not just come from the CEO. It was the masses of workers who willingly enforced such a mindset. I'm tired of this "oh the poor innocent developers under the heel of the BIG EVIL BOSSES! If only they could express themselves!" cope. Especially here, since the people in charge of concord are EX BUNGIE DEVS.

They call it toxic positivity, you have to stay positive even if there is a dire need to be negative

IIRC former devs claimed ANY criticism of the game was banned and a 1 way ticket to getting fired if you didnt "fix your attitude". The game was also in an unplayable state after 4 years when sony bought them. It was an awful decision all around, sony should have just lit that money on fire.

 

[MasterAce]

In the past we had smaller teams making better games for less money. Now it takes 100M to ”drag-and-drop” develop some generic Unreal engine blob by patching together various ideas from other games. They are trying to copy success, not make something new and interesting…