Sony has learned from Concord's failure

The heavy failure of the Concord game and the closure of its developer studio have forced Sony managers to review the development and release policies of new games.

Despite impressive sales of 65.5 million PlayStation 5 consoles and strong performance in software sales, Sony has a dark spot in its financial record. The Concord game, which was released on August 23 for PlayStation 5 and PC, sold only 25,000 copies and after two weeks was removed from the stores and its servers were shut down.

According to Gamingbolt , Hiroki Totoki, Sony's chief operating and financial manager, said in a question and answer session after the release of the company's financial report: "In the case of new IPs, naturally, you cannot be sure of the result until you launch the product. However, we should have gone through more evaluation steps and done user tests and internal evaluations earlier."

He also mentioned the problem of insular structure in Sony and added that the communication between different development and sales departments could have been smoother.

Sadhiko Hayakawa, Sony's senior vice president of finance and investor relations, also pointed to the failure of Concord and the success of Helldivers 2, stressing that the company learned valuable lessons from both experiences.

Sony has announced that after Ghost of Yōtei launches in 2025, it will release major single-player games every year. There has also been good progress in improving service-based game development processes, and new projects such as Bungie's Marathon and Haven Studios' Fairgame$ are well underway.