Sony Talks Concord's Failure And The Hard Lessons Learned From It

The disastrous launch of Concord was the focus of a new interview with Sony president Hiroki Totoki, who spoke about how the company plans to avoid a repeat of this with future game releases. Part of Sony's strategy will ensure that a game goes through a more rigorous period of testing and evaluation prior to it being released.

"Currently, we are still in the process of learning," Hiroki said through an interpreter (via VGC) during a Q&A session following its latest financial earnings call. "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."

Hiroki added that Sony will also look at when it plans to launch a game, so as to avoid potentially cannibalizing sales between releases from its first-party studios and third-party partners.

It's worth noting that Concord launched just three days after Black Myth: Wukong, a game that performed very well on PS5 and PC, and other high-profile releases around Concord included Star Wars Outlaws and Madden NFL 25. On the opposite end of the live-service spectrum, Helldivers 2 was a surprise hit on PS5 and PC, and Sony said that there were lessons to be learned from both games, going forward.

The company also plans to release a mix of single-player and live-service games in the future, allowing it to focus on its strengths while pursuing riskier projects. Other takeaways from the financial earnings call have been largely positive, as Sony reported that sales for its Game and Network Services division were up and 3.8 million PS5 consoles were shipped during this quarter, which ended on September 30.