Concord Developer Firewalk Studios Shuts Down; Game Permanently Sunsets
This September, Sony pulled the Concord servers mere weeks after the game’s release due to super low playercounts. While the PlayStation division was contemplating on their options back then, it seems they’ve finally decided on that, and it’s to shut down the game permanently, and also the developer. Firewalk Studios as well.
While it sounded like Sony was pivoting Concord to be a free-to-play title, the company decided to not pursue that road, and instead decided to shut down Concord.
In a letter on the official Sony Interactive website, PlayStation’s Co-CEO Hermen Hulst penned a later about the closure. Here’s the excerpt regarding Concord and Firelwak.
Concord Shuts Down Permanently, as the Developer Closes Its Doors
Regarding Firewalk, as announced in early September (An Important Update on Concord), certain aspects of Concord were exceptional, but others did not land with enough players, and as a result we took the game offline. We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options.
After much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio. I want to thank all of Firewalk for their craftsmanship, creative spirit and dedication.
Firewalk Studios also penned a letter to gamers as the devs sign off.
Firewalk is signing off one last time.
Firewalk began with the idea of bringing the joy of multiplayer to a larger audience. Along the way we assembled an incredible team who were able to:
– Navigate growing a new startup into a team during a global pandemic: Firewalk was founded in 2018 and was very small for its first couple years, only entering full Production in 2022.– Build a new, customized next-generation FPS engine in Unreal 4 -> 5, delivering top-tier gameplay feel, beautiful worlds, and a performant 60fps technical experience on a stable and scalable backend on PS5 and PC to hundreds of thousands of players in our beta.
– Manage an acquisition / integration while readying technical and preliminary tests.
– And ultimately ship and deliver a great FPS experience to players- even if it landed much more narrowly than hoped against a heavily consolidated market.
We took some risks along the way – marrying aspects of card battlers and fighting games with first-person-shooters – and although some of these and other aspects of the IP didn’t land as we hoped, the idea of putting new things into the world is critical to pushing the medium forward.
In the same letter posted by Hulst, he also announced that Neon Koi, a first-party mobile developer, has also closed up shop.
There’s a lot of learnings to be had with Concord. Did it fail due to its character design? Maybe. Perhaps poor marketing? That could be it as well. Unfortunately for Firewalk, Concord’s failure is one that’s history-making, though not in a good way. In all my years gaming, I have never seen a game — regardless if it’s multiplayer or not — flop this hard.
Sony does have a shot at redemption though, and that’s with Bungie’s Marathon, which seems to be due for release sometime next year.
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I hope the correct lesson is learned from this. The studio was running rampant with what is known as Toxic Affirmation. Basically anyone who said anything negative about the project was fired, nobody was allowed to say no or question the direction of the game. When this happens, the game is usually not targeting a larger audience and instead only targeting what the team leads wanted to see in their game. This is usually fine for small indie games with small groups, but when it comes to a $200,000,000 project you rely on getting feedback other than ‘everything looks great’.