Despite being in development for about eight years, Concord's potential legacy was cut short when its servers went offline just two weeks after launch - and according to Sony's president and vice president, the company has learned quite a bit from the shooter's failure.
Speaking during Sony's most recent financial earnings call, president Hiroki Totoki discusses live service games like Concord and how the company's dip into such titles is still very much a learning process. "Currently, we are still in the process of learning," he explains. "Basically, with regards to new IP, of course, you don't know the result until you actually try it." When there are results, however, Sony does use them for future reference.
"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," continues Totoki. "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 organization, so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations in terms of development, and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother."
Going forward, as Totoki describes during the call, "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 cannibalization so that we can maximize our performance in terms of title launches."
Vice president Sadahiko Hayakawa shares similar thoughts on Concord and its lasting effects on Sony. According to Hayakawa, the company "gained a lot of experience" from live service titles like Concord and Helldivers 2. While the latter was successful, Sony "learned a lot from both" and intends to share 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."
Sony now intends "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," as Hayakawa details. I know I'll certainly be keeping my eye on what's to come, personally.
