Concord collapses, Firewalk falls – it’s a brutal year for game development

Sony is shutting down Firewalk, the studio behind its live-service flop, Concord. It’s the biggest, most expensive casualty of an increasingly crowded hero shooter market – and it won’t be the last

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It’s official: after Sony pulled its struggling hero shooter Concord from sale shortly after it launched, the studio that made it will now be closing. Firewalk Studios was bought by Sony less than two years ago, as part of a strategy to improve PlayStation’s live-service portfolio. The closure of Firewalk cements Concord’s place as one of the biggest and most consequential flops in gaming history: the cost to Sony will have been in the hundreds of millions, with estimates of Concord’s development cost ranging from $200m to $400m in total.

Sony also closed Neon Koi, a developer with offices in Helsinki and Berlin, which focused on “mobile action games with epic stories” but had yet to release a game.