Sony’s Concord: A Cautionary Tale in Gaming Missteps and Lessons Learned

With billions of kroner spent on development and only two weeks on the marketConcord stands as one of the biggest failures in gaming history. Now the publisher Sony promises to be more precise in the preliminary work, to avoid similar situations in the future.

In the company’s latest quarterly report, Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki (via VGC) that it is impossible to know how a game will go before you launch it. However, he admitted that more can always be done.

– We are still in the learning phase and with a new game series you really don’t know the outcome until you try. So for us, now that we look back on it, we probably needed more rounds of testing – including user testing or internal evaluation, and a modified timing for the those trips. So we need to start them earlier, and we should have done these tests much earlier than we did, Totoki said.

Sadahiko Hayakawa, another Sony executive, emphasized that the company learned a lot from the launch of both Concord and Helldivers 2. The latter was far more successful, but had important lessons for projects of the time to coming

Elsewhere in its quarterly report, Sony shared that the PlayStation 5 has sold 65 million units since its launch in 2020. The updated variant, Games for PlayStation 5 Prolaunched last week and was not included in the latest quarterly report.

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