PlayStation will hold more tests to avoid another Concord disaster

Sony/PlayStation held a meeting with its shareholders to present the financial data for Q2 2024. During this meeting, the current CFO, Hiroki Totoki, faced numerous questions about Concord, one of the biggest disasters in the brand’s history.

Totoki explained that the journey into the Games as a Service (GaaS) segment for PlayStation, is still one of learning, and they have taken away many lessons from the Concord experience. Here’s what he said (via VGC):

“Currently, we are still in the process of learning, and basically, with regards to new IP, of course, you don’t know the result until you actually try it.

“So for us, for our reflection, 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.

“Also, we have a siloed organisation, so going beyond the boundaries of those organisations in terms of development, and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother.

“And then going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we do have many different windows. And we want to be able to select the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalisation, so that we can maximize our performance in terms of title launches. That’s all I have.”

He emphasized two key points: the necessity of conducting more tests and internal audits to genuinely assess a product’s or game’s viability, and the importance of better leveraging release windows to prevent sales cannibalization between first-party and third-party games.

Concord and Helldivers 2: The Curious Case of Opposites

While Concord was a disaster, Helldivers 2 turned out to be its complete opposite. The latest game from Arrowhead Studios has sold over 12 million units, making it one of the biggest commercial successes of 2024.

Sadahiko Hayakawa, Sony’s VP of Finance, discussed the contrasting experiences between the two games (via VGC):

“We launched two live-service games this year,” he explained. “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.

“We intend to build on an optimum title portfolio during the current mid-range plan period that combines single-player games – which are our strengths 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.”

Hayakawa’s message is clear: PlayStation’s current aim is to build a more optimized portfolio that combines single-player game releases with GaaS, thereby mitigating risks along the way.

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