Sony will close down Firewalk Studios the developer of the now-offline Concord hero shooter that was potentially preparing for a free-to-play relaunch. That will no longer happen. Firewalk will dissolve, though a breakdown between layoffs and who may move elsewhere inside Sony is as of yet unclear. Here’s what Hermen Hulst said in a message to staff (via The Verge):
“We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options,” Hulst said. “After much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio. I want to thank all of Firewalk for their craftsmanship, creative spirit and dedication.”
The launch of Concord will remain one of the largest video game disasters of all time, a title that took years and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, shut down just two weeks after launch due to an abysmally low playercount.
While the shutdown of the game shortly after launch seemed to leave at least some room open for a potential relaunch down the line, likely free-to-play to remove the $40 barrier to entry, if you’d been paying attention to the trajectory of the game, it was pretty clear there was no point to that. The price may have been ill-advised, but the free beta shortly before launch barely attracted 2,000 players on Steam. At launch it peaked under 700, when fellow mega-disaster Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League had 13,000. Sales estimates were at just 25,000 copies, and Sony had to then refund all of those.
In short, the price was not the problem, and it seemed unlikely that any sort of free relaunch or gameplay tweaks could salvage the game. Sure, there are plenty of “redemption” stories in gaming, but if you’re looking at something like a Cyberpunk 2077 turnaround, problematic as it was, it still launched with a million concurrent players on Steam. You need something to build on, and Concord had nothing.
2024 has proved to be a series of wild swings for Sony with live service Helldivers 2 being a surprisingly huge hit, while Concord is this historic disaster. Yesterday, Bungie issued a video about its own live game it will make for Sony, Marathon, which seemed to indicate it may slip from its proposed 2025 launch year.
Firewalk had a lot of talent and I very much hope that Sony can find places for them elsewhere in the company rather than simply issuing a mass layoff (Update: They are in fact doing a mass layoff of 170 people). There are plenty of live service projects to go around over there. Concord simply did not come together on any level, and as Herman Hulst says, there are plenty of lessons to be learned.
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