When it comes to gaming failures there are only a few that are absolute disasters. One was a game as a service (GaaS) with an expensive budget, made by former Bungie employees (makers of Halo/Destiny) with 150 employees, 8 years of development and according to Sony was going to be so successful with the gaming giant buying the studio but ending up being the biggest failure in gaming history. Plus we’ll be diving into why Playstation has a lack of first party development and why they bought the studio behind the disaster. Let’s explore Firewalk studios “Concord” and the failure of Playstation live service initiative.
The Origins: Firewalk
In 2018 a studio originated in Bellevue Washington (State) was founded named Firewalk Studios. The company was founded by only two men. Tony Hsu (former executive at activision) and Ryan Ellies (former creative director at Bungie) who worked on the highly successful Destiny. Both formed Firewalk studios and wanted to bring Activision’s/Bungie’s talent and wanted to make multiplayer games that would bring people together and have strong gameplay with inspiring art (according to Firewalk). The company stated that their first game took 8 years to develop with it starting in 2016 meaning it could be an idea at Activision/Bungie. It was originally not owned by PS studios but rather the company Probability Monsters. But in 2019 a new CEO would want to take Playstation into a new direction.
Live Service and Playstation
In 2019, the new CEO of Sony, Jim Ryan was about ushering a new era of Playstation with the 9th generation of consoles. The PS5 would be the ultimate new console with the new tagline “Play like Never before”, although this occurred before the 9th generation games like Fortnite, League of Legends, Fall Guys, Among Us, Destiny, GTA Online and more were coming out. These games known as live service will continue to live on with updates and high replay ability, with many companies trying to chase a trend that will keep the player coming back and buying the battle pass which was achieved from the success Fortnite and there own microtransactions and currency. Better yet when the game works it would be massively successful and make a ton of money. So Playstation would begin to foray into this genre of games and its studios during the Playstation 5 generation would begin to have new ideas for live service games. Naughty Dog (creators of the Last of Us and Uncharted) wanted to create a live service game based on the successful Last of Us game with the studio even bringing on the expert of the Fortnite battle pass. Insomniac (creators of Spiderman and Ratchet Clank) created an idea for a Spider-Man multiplayer similar to GTA online, Sony’s London Studios had a fantasy themed live service idea, etc. Remember, Sony did not do much live service during the PS4 era and only adding multiplayer to there single player games and there were a few multiplayer focused games like Killzone, Resistance, the newer Gran Turismo games, Little Big Planet and Dreams. But the first new IP for the PS5 and the first live service game Sony would publish was Destruction Allstars developed by Lucid Games. This was, of course, a total failure as in under a week it would lose 80% of its playerbase. This was a learning experience and Sony would eventually buy Bungie as both to one up the ABK/Xbox deal and to assist on Live Service. Sony would make a full buyout with Haven Studios with their Former Ubisoft/EA employees. However Sony would have 3 publishing/console exclusivity deals with Arrowhead studios the makers of Helldivers 1, Deviation Games (with their former Call of Duty Employees) and in 2021 a collaboration between Probability Monsters & Firewalk as they were chosen to be a 2024 live service game heading to PC/PS5 which is a good time to mention to give a healthy playerbase the game would come to PC day 1. By 2023 Sony would buy out all of Firewalk’s studios and employees as Sony believed a lot in the project. We know this because a of podcast from Colin Moriaty as this game would be a “Star Wars like” IP, the future of Playstation and “Herman Hulst’s Baby” who was the studio head of Playstation at the time, a co founder of Guerrilla, a head honcho of Horizon and Killzone games and now, the CEO of Playstation creative side. What was even more surprising (or not) about this podcast was the toxic positivity as most of the developers believed this was a perfect game, with perfect character design and gameplay and if you had different opinions, you would get fired. However back at Playstation the live service plan would backfire with many of the games mentioned getting canceled. Naughty Dog did not want to create a live service game and while it was obviously going to be successful with the success of the Last of Us TV show the game was officially canceled in late 2023 as they went on to develop a possible original idea. Insomniac canceled the Spider-Man multiplayer, but this was for good reason as Spider-Man 2 would end up selling over 11 million copies and their next game “Wolverine” might be the game of the generation (will see how that ends up). The London studios multiplayer was not only canceled but caused the studio to close which was the same thing for the not owned by Sony, Devetation games. Firesprite Studios was in the planning phase of a Twisted Metal reboot and would eventually get canceled to move on to a possible reboot of Siren or Until Dawn. Even Bungie would start getting issues with layoffs and game cancellations. The only real success was Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2 however would unfortunately have a downfall thanks to the PSN account requirement situation (which is a whole different story). The only 2 developments by PS studios for live service were both Haven and Firewalks game but in May of 2023 we would find out what Firewalk was working on.
The PS Showcase of 2023, The May State of play of 2024, Beta and launch of Concord
In May of 2023 Sony would hold there 3rd showcase in this generation, this hour long presentation would feature Dragon’s Dogma 2, Alan Wake 2, Final Fantasy 16, Metal Gear Solid: Delta and Spider-Man 2 but would show world premieres of 3 PS studios live service games including Bungie’s “Marathon” Extraction Shooter, Haven’s heist shooter “Fairgame$” and Firewalk’s 5v5 shooter “Concord”. However the Trailer was a weird cinematic trailer telling us nothing about the game outside of the fact that the team that the players were joining were called the “Freegunners”, (similar to Helldivers in its game) the game’s name of Concord and a 2024 release window. However thanks to the Playstation Blog post many gamers eventually found out that the game was a 5v5 multiplayer shooter and maybe even Hero Shooter, basically a shooter where you pick a variety of characters and its own abilities. The showcase was not well received with many saying that playstation did not outline a roadmap for its first party games and was only “carried” by Spiderman 2. The game went radio silent until next year in 2024 where speculation about a State of Play/Showcase would be featuring Concord which as a reminder in the 2023 Cinematic trailer was slated for a 2024 release window with Sony saying there were no delays on the project. While many disliked the Cinematic trailer, nothing can prepare for the universal hatred this game would get. The game would have a 10 minute long presentation at the 30 minute State of Play. The presentation would start with a cinematic trailer which according to Firewalk said they would be releasing every week on every Friday to develop the characters and try to capitalize on the success of Overwatch and Valorant. Many criticized the trailer for being boring and having “MCU type” writing with many quips included with action scenes along with how generic it looked. The cinematic trailer was followed by a gameplay trailer and was shown with many hating how the game was a 5v5 hero shooter, something that the gaming industry was filled with, becoming an oversaturated market with many free to play ones to begin with. This was also during a turning point in the gaming industry, while there many success in Games as a Service, many failures were becoming more likely including Anthem, The Avengers, Knockout City, Law Breakers and Rumbleverse and just in 2024 there were more failures including Sucide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Foamstars and Skull & Bones. There were still successes like Helldivers 2 but by and large there were more failures than successes and sometimes the success won’t last long because the gaming community did not want it because there would be more studio layoffs and closures. If that wasn’t enough the game would be heavily criticized for its both generic and for some “ugly” and awful characters designs with many online making fun of the games art direction and character design as a hero shooter has to have characters that people would make love, make art of out of said characters and even cosplaying. The gameplay was the only part that was agreed upon to be fine, as the game showed its Bungie-like shooting with many comparing the PVP to Destiny. In total the game would get 82% of dislikes on youtube and would cause the State of Play to be hated by many Playstation fans. The games Beta would fare even worse as the two betas in July were pretty bad in terms of attendance. Professional critics did like the game for its really solid gameplay however another problem was that the game was $40 instead of being free to play. This was one of the reasons why the player count for the beta (at least on Steam, not Epic Games or PS5) was 2388 at the peak. The launch in August would fare even worse, only having 697 at its peak for its Steam player count. Many also said that the game only sold 25,000 units on a rumored 400 million dollar budget making it the most expensive Sony game ever created. This is evidenced by the credits being an hour and 12 minutes, Not to mention there was drama about one of the game developers calling gamers giving negative reviews/feedback calling them “talentless freaks”. All told the game failures were due to the price, presentation and a couple of Playstation fans saying that Sony did not Understand their audience and should have made reboots of classic Sony games like Killzone or Resistances. However Despite Sony pushing hard for this game (giving its own controller, animated shorts and even its own episode for the upcoming “Secret Level” series along with the whole “future of Playstation” quote from Playstation) Sony had a major game that they did not even license or create with Black Myth Wukong. Due to technical reasons the company Game Science couldn’t get Black Myth Wukong to work on both of the Xbox Series consoles meaning for a couple months Black Myth Wukong was a PS5 console exclusive. The game would end up selling 10 million copies in under 3 days on both PC/PS5 and a total of 20 million. Many gamers would eventually forget about Concord and by September 6th, 14 days after it launched the game was officially dead. The games servers would go offline and couldn’t be played, plus anybody who bought the game would get a refund on PC/PS5. September 6th would also be the same day a robot would literally save the PS5.
The Launch of Astro Bot and the future of Playstation.
Astro bot would officially launch on September 6th 2024. The game was a 3D platformer with over 304 collectable bots and 150 cameos of famous and forgotten playstation characters. Funny enough the game would be revealed on the same day as Concord’s state of play gameplay reveal. The game would end up being the highest praised game of 2024 with many saying that the game was the opposite of Concord with incredibly creative level design and much more character and charm and even a possible Game of the Year candidate. As for Playstation they are hoping to recover from the failure of Concord, however in the closing statement Sony said “We are exploring options” so many have theorized that the game could possibly get character redesigns and maybe go free to play but judging how much a colossal failure its unknown if they will ever bring it back. Many are also concerned about Fairgame$ with its also generic appearance and “Ubisoft”style gameplay/characters. But hopefully Sony can learn to balance with single player and Live service and learn from the failure of Concord and the success of Astro bot.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: As of October 2024, Firewalk studios and Sony’s owned mobile studio Neon Koi (formerly Savage Game studios) have both shut down and Closed leading to both the closusure Concord’s short lived and failed story and the game (for now) may never ever come back, Neon Koi was rumored to (maybe) do a mobile version of the game and according to job listings was an action Live service Mobile game and is now canceled. Hopefully all 172 employees from Firewalk and all 38 employees from Neon Koi will find new jobs.
