Did everything Sony put out last generation appeal to you?

For me there was a decent chunk of games they put out that didn't interest me including some of their multiplayer stuff. But that didn't want me to root for them to fail. I didn't get upset because I wanted more Uncharted and The Last of Us and blamed other studios for taking away that investment. It doesn't work like that and honestly its a little selfish. There's a decent portion of Sony's core fanbase that plays live service games like Helldivers 2 and GT7. Some of these developers are actually passionate about the live service games they're working on. 

Rooting for these games to fail is rooting for developers to lose their jobs. That's the business side of things. As someone who loves their prestige single player games, I root for everything in their portfolio to be a success, including Concord, Concrete Genie and Gravity Rush 2.  

Even with the disastrous launch it really seems like there should have been something salvageable in there, now they're down half a billion and the game doesn't even exist any longer. I feel like every part of this process was handled badly, guess we can only hope they learn something from it...

Keep the studio just let go the art department and repurpose the studio. Support studio or change up leadership for better direction to the next project. Imagine if Nintendo closed Retro studios after their disastrous start. They changed the leadership got some direction and a new project and gave us Metroid Prime.

Basically this.
Fire the art department and anyone yelling for more DEI stuff in there.
Get rid of the toxic positivity crowd, and some of the management that made the enviroment like that, and the worse decision makers.

Find out who was responsible for what parts of the game, and stuff that seemed to work well, or was coded well.
Keep them on.

It was either that and the probable tax layoff or keep the game around and transform into some kind of Free to Play GAAS which would still have to compete with the overcrowded market.

So much wasted here ...

So Concord had a 200 million dev budget, that shows the scale of the GAAS investment from Sony, for comparison no game Nintendo has ever made has come any close to having a 200 million budget, and Sony likely have multiple Concord budget GAAS games in development now at the same time, if more of them bomb like Concord they are in for a world of trouble.

They really drew it out for some reason. The devs must have been living in constant anxiety the past few months.

I’ve seen a lot of people at various places claiming this is the beginning of the end for Sony in the GaaS market, but that’s not accurate at all. They still had a massive hit in that space with Helldivers II this year. And there’s still Gran Turismo, which is a live service/GaaS now, and MLB, and they now own Destiny, and there’s Marathon coming, and still that Jade Raymond studio game with a $ sign in it somewhere, and other projects I am forgetting.


This is still very much the future for them. Also this closure pretty much cements Concord as the biggest flop of all time.

I think that's the point - they need to build on the successes they've had over time (i.e. GT & MLB were existing IP's; Helldivers had a clear direction building on the last game), rather than just throwing everything at a new studio and new IP with nothing behind it.

I still think nixxing TLOU Online, even though it has undoubtedly freed up resources for Naughty Dog to go back to single-player games, was probably a mistake. That cancelled multiplayer Spider Man game from Insomniac would also likely have been a better starting point than this.