Sony Admits Failure, Reaffirms Commitment To Single-Player Games

Concord was one of the biggest embarrassments of any company in 2024, and we’re talking about the company that greenlit Madame Web. Produced with a nine-figure budget over the course of eight years, the end product lasted only mere days before being shut down. Who could have predicted such a catastrophe? ….A lot of people, actually.

There’s the fact that live service games are incredibly risky and much more prone to failure than success, even though the handful that have made it have been very profitable. In addition, Concord belonged to the hero shooter genre, which peaked years ago, and didn’t add anything new to the table. Its characters were blatant ripoffs, and it was obviously a plan concocted years ago that, due to tits size, couldn’t course-correct for a changing market.

But there’s good news. Companies don’t always admit to their mistakes, let alone learn from them, but Sony president Hiroki Totoki completely faced up to it in a recent financial call. “Currently we are still in the process of learning,” Totoki said. “Basically, with regards to new IP, of course you don’t know the result until you actually try it. So for our reflection, probably we need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates, we need to bring them forward. We should have done those gates much earlier than we did.”

In addition, Sony’s finance and IR chief Sadahiko Hayakawa pledged commitment to releasing more single-player games, which carry much less of a risk factor. “[We will] continue releasing major single-player game titles every year from next fiscal year onwards,” he stated. Several single-player games are already on the schedule, such as Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2, both of which are expected in 2025 unless delays happen.