Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hermen Hulst announced in an internal email – also shared on the company’s website – his intention to close two of his subsidiaries on Tuesday, October 29. Among them, Firewalk, the American studio that developed the game. Concordwhich meant a complete commercial failure. The number of employees affected is not yet clear. The company’s LinkedIn page, however, lists between 50 and 200 people.
The other affected studio, Neon Koi, specializes in mobile games. The German-Finnish company was acquired by Sony in 2022 and has between 11 and 50 employees, according to its LinkedIn page.
Firewalk, located in Bellevue in the United States, was founded in 2018 by former employees of Bungie (the studio behind the series Halo) with the aim of developing a multiplayer shooting game. In 2023, Sony, seeking to build a new strategy around a set of “service games” (regularly updated games designed to be played for long periods) decides to acquire the studio and its project. it’s about Concordwhose existence was announced to the general public during the summer of the same year.
A commercial failure of rare magnitude
The gestation of the game was very long and very expensive: its development lasted more than eight years, with a budget of more than 200 million dollars, according to the site. kotaku. Sold for 40 euros (unlike some of its direct competitors, which are free), the title was finally released on August 23 on PlayStation 5 and PC. It received a catastrophic commercial reception. If we do not know the figures on PS5, the title will never exceed 700 simultaneous users on PC, according to the SteamDB site, which analyzes the data available on the main computer game purchasing platform. For comparison, Miscellaneous Hell 2Another game on the Sony service released in May, recorded peaks of more than 400,000 players on PC, a few days after its launch.
Some analysts interviewed by IGN estimate the number of total sales of the title at only 25,000, which is why, just two weeks after its launch, Sony decided to cut off the servers. Concordwithdraw the game from sale and refund buyers, leaving doubts about a possible return under another economic model, which will ultimately never see the light of day. “Player versus player first-person shooters are a constantly evolving competitive space and, unfortunately, we fell short of our goals with this title”writes Hermen Hulst in his email made public on Tuesday.
This announcement constitutes a new episode in the succession of closures and layoffs that the video game industry as a whole is experiencing. Microsoft, similarly, decided last May to close its Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks studios (eventually acquired). In total, the Game Industry Layoffs site, which counts layoffs in the sector, estimates the number of jobs destroyed in 2024 at 13,000.
