Sony president reflects on why Concord failed

Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki has shared his views on why Concord was a failure.

During a Q&A session following its latest financial earnings call, Sony management was asked numerous questions about the live service game, which was shut down 11 days after launch.

Totoki explained that the company’s foray into live service games is still a learning process, and that it had to take lessons from what happened with Concord.

“Currently, we are still in the process of learning,” he said via an interpreter. “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.”

Earlier in the call, Sony senior vice president for finance and IR Sadahiko Hayakawa noted the difference between the success of Helldivers 2 and the failure of Concord.

“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.”