PlayStation CEO Shares Learnings from Concord Failure, Reckons PSN Requirement Will Keep PC Games Safe

Today, Sony released its Q2 2024 financial report, revealing that the PlayStation 5 had reached 65.5 million units and the quarter had performed well enough to warrant an upgrade to the full-year forecast for the gaming segment.

Following the report, the usual investors call saw PlayStation Co-CEO Hiroki Totoki talking about a couple of hot topics. Speaking of the failure of Concord, which led to wasting over $200 million spent on the project and to the closure of the developer Firewalk Studios last week, he said (excerpt via GamesRadar):

Currently, we are still in the process of learning. Basically, with regards to new IP, of course, you don’t know the result until you actually try it. So for us, for our reflection, we probably need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of such gates. And then we need to bring them forward, and we should have done those gates much earlier than we did. Also, we have a siloed organization, so going beyond the boundaries of those organizations in terms of development, and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother.

Totoki also talked about the pushback of PC gamers on Sony’s hard requirement to create a PlayStation Network account in games like God of War Ragnarök and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. The executive admitted that users haven’t liked the policy, but he stressed the need to ensure safety in live service games through the PSN account requirement:

We have learned a lot. The way to face the issues regarding PC, for instance. The PlayStation accounts that we have offered – well actually, by offering them, for instance, sometimes that tends to…