Sony and PlayStation have shut the doors on Firewalk Studios after the developers lost more than $200 million for their parent company in about two weeks. Sony purchased the studio in 2023.
Before its release, Concord — a space-aged first-person shooter game — was criticized for its excessive and forced diversity themes, including multiple characters who were morbidly obese and even robots with preferred pronouns.
It took just 14 days after its August 23 release date for Sony to shut down operations and pull the game from both physical and digital shelves.
At the time, Sony said certain "aspects of the game" didn't "land the way [they were] intended" and that Concord would be pulled from the market immediately. It also offered refunds to all customers.
Sony also said it was still determining the "best path ahead" for the game.
'We took the game offline.'
Fast forward six weeks, and Sony has announced it will close the studio, marking one of the most monetarily-damaging mistakes in recent gaming history.
"Certain aspects of Concord were exceptional," Sony generously wrote on its blog. "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," Sony added.
The gaming giant noted that the studio "did not hit" its "targets."
While the game was a massive failure that took approximately eight years to develop, Sony's financial implications were even bigger than initially expected.
Initial reports estimated a $100 million loss for the studio, given the cost of similar projects. However, insider testimony has since revealed that the game's initial development deal was over $200 million, not counting the rest of the studio's agreement with Sony.
Citing sources familiar with the agreement, Kotaku reported that the $200 million was not even enough to cover the game's development and did not include the purchase of Concord's intellectual property rights or the purchase of Firewalk Studios itself.
'Putting new things into the world is critical.'
Firewalk has since issued a lengthy final statement on X, disregarding the financial losses and the real reasons its game was widely rejected.
"Firewalk is signing off one last time," it wrote.
The company stated that the project "landed much more narrowly than hoped," but qualified its statement with a claim that the market is "heavily consolidated."
The studio then justified its project by saying that while "other aspects of the IP didn't land," the idea of "putting new things into the world is critical to pushing the medium forward."
The studio closes out the post with "end transmission," as if it were written in the fantasy world it had created. This odd disconnect, which largely ignores the reality of a monumental ideological failure, echoes similar sentiments that DEI-laden games have pushed out recently.
Many studios have acted as if they are playing with Monopoly money, which has cost big studios hundreds of millions while often hiring ideological allies to push their viewpoints through their games (see Unknown 9 and Dustborn).
A recent Suicide Squad game cost Warner Bros. $200 million.
Unknown 9: Awakening is estimated at a loss between $80-$120 million.
Other games like Dustborn simply blew through $1.56 million in grants.
Only time will tell whether other studios seemingly come to their senses the way Sony has and cut their losses before it's too late.
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