Sony has officially killed off Concord and is shuttering the studio behind the game. Concord’s servers were taken down just two weeks after the launch of the competitive team shooter from Firewalk Studios after poor sales. Firewalk’s game director Ryan Ellis chose to move himself into a more supportive role following Concord’s struggles, and Sony had said it would consider its options for the project. The decision is in.
“After much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio,” Hermen Hulst of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Studio Business Group said in a statement today. “I want to thank all of Firewalk for their craftsmanship, creative spirit and dedication.” A representative told Bloomberg News that Firewalk Studios had 172 employees who will lose their jobs.
The online game business is brutal, and Concord may have suffered for its long development time, which meant other team shooters had already risen to prominence and defined players’ expectations. Many similar games are free to play and support themselves financially with a battle pass or seasonal model. Gamers may have balked at the $40 price tag for a new property, or maybe the genre was simply too crowded for Concord to muscle in.
Whatever the reasons, today’s news marks another difficult chapter for the game development world. Firewalk Studios is an outlier for having this level of commercial failure, but it’s still yet another closure in the industry that has seen a lot of turbulence in recent years. Layoffs and shutdowns have been a top story in gaming, but several of the recent cases have been like Firewalk, which was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment just last spring. Netflix abruptly shut down its AAA studio last week before the team had even announced a project. Microsoft closed three studios from the Zenimax family earlier this year. As fewer parties control a growing share of the games industry, the tolerance for experimentation and slim profit margins will likely shrink too. And this type of sudden upheaval could become all the more common.