Sony changes the way first party PS5 games work after Concord failure

Sony has discussed how its approach to game development has changed in the wake of Concord, as they try to avoid another catastrophic flop.

PlayStation might be riding high when it comes to console sales, but it hasn’t had much in the way of first party games to shout about recently.

Last year’s Astro Bot went some way to paper over the cracks, but the hits are few and far between otherwise – with many studios instead lumbered with live service projects like Fairgames, Marathon, and the heavily rumoured Horizon Online.

Sony’s initially bold live service ambitions have resulted in a slew of cancelled projects, including the dramatic flop of Concord, which has left its first party slate looking incredibly empty for the coming months – with only the single-player Ghost Of Yōtei picking up the slack in 2025.

The failure of Concord, which was pulled after two weeks and supposedly cost upwards of $250 million (£184,856), has led to changes in how Sony tests its games, in a bid to avoid history repeating itself.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Hermen Hulst, CEO of the Studio Business Group at PlayStation Studios, said: ‘I don’t want to teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply.’

When discussing what’s changedin the wake of Concord, Hulst said: ‘The number [of live service releases] is not so important. What is important to me is having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities.

‘We have since put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing in very many different ways. The advantage of every failure… is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is.’

The article describes this ‘oversight’ as including ‘more focus on group testing’, an ‘encouragment to learn from others’ between Sony studios, and ‘closer relationships between top executives’.

While these all sound like vague platitudes, of the sort you’d expect from any exec, Sucker Punch art director Jason Connell provided an example of this tighter collaboration.

Connell said there were no ‘boundaries’ enforced by Sony when developing Ghost Of Yōtei, but explained when the company would intervene: ‘If we’re heading towards a giant landmine, like there’s another studio making exactly the same game, that’s good information.’

Considering how vague these statements are, it’s unclear if anything significant has changed behind the scenes at Sony following Concord’s demise – especially as the example given seems like the most bog standard warning you could give to a developer, if two projects do have similarities.

At this point, the only real proof Sony can provide is some actual games. Beyond Ghost Of Yōtei, we still don’t have release dates for Wolverine, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Fairgames, or the heavily rumoured God Of War prequel.

Elsewhere in the piece, Hulst reaffirmed how he wants turn more PlayStation IP into ‘a franchise for people beyond gaming’ – in the same vein as The Last Of Us and (at a stretch) Twisted Metal, which have both had successful TV shows.

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