PlayStation is serious about avoiding more Concorde-like disasters in the future

Catastrophe agreement left quite a deep mark on PlayStation; especially in its games-as-a-service strategy. Following the game’s disastrous debut – which would be the costliest flop in the company’s history – and the closure of the studio they run, some of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s (SIE) most important executives are pondering the case and what action to take. they are thinking of adopting to prevent this from happening again in the future.

During a call with shareholders after the presentation of financial results for the last quarter: Hiroki Totokithe current president of SIE and head of operations and finance at Sony Group, spoke about an error that meant agreement.

The manager explained that when dealing with new intellectual property, it is impossible to know how the public will receive it until it hits the market. Despite this, he stressed that PlayStation should be created more stages of internal evaluation and user testing before launching a new game as a service. What he thought should have happened earlier with agreement.

Totoki also admitted that the operation isolated Between various corporate departments, SIE may have contributed to the Firewalk Studios game fiasco. “We’re a siled organization, so going outside of those organizations from a development and sales perspective, I think could be a lot more flexible,” he said.

PlayStation wants to avoid more disasters by offering games as a service

Another interesting point that the SIE President emphasized when speaking about the failure agreement — and the company’s future in games as a service — was optimize the choice of launch dates for these offers. Totoki emphasized that the future goal is to better select release windows on PlayStation, both between first-party and third-party games, to prevent them from cannibalizing each other and hurting each other’s sales.

The executive emphasized that PlayStation is still learning to navigate such a competitive segment as games as a service. And what happened to agreement It was a strong enough slap in the face that the Japanese company would remember it for a long time.

Another executive who raised the issue was Sadahiko Hayakawa, Sony’s senior vice president of finance. The above highlighted that this year the company has seen the good and bad sides of gaming as a service market with premieres helldivers 2 And agreementand that everything serves develop and improve.

“We will share the lessons we’ve learned from our successes and failures with all of our studios, including in managing title development, as well as continually adding expanded content and scaling the service post-launch to strengthen our stewardship. systems,” he explained.

What happened to agreement?

Catastrophe agreement He wasn’t just another member of the video game industry.. He hero shooter from Firewalk Studios was released in late August after over 8 years in development, but PlayStation pulled it from stores just two weeks after its debut. The company shut down the servers and returned money to all players who purchased it.

The game suffered not only from a very poor advertising campaign at a time when the genre is overpopulated with alternatives, but also from the decision to put it on sale for $40. An error, given that most proposals of this type free game.

This led to agreement would sell less than 25,000 copies on PS5 and PC once it’s launched, destroying any possibility of success. At the end of October, Hermen Hulst, co-CEO of PlayStation, announced the closure of Firewalk Studios and the permanent cancellation of the game.

According to unofficial data, the development agreement He would have faced inconvenience almost from the start. However, the study could sweeten them by using a supposed culture toxic positivity. It is estimated that the game would have cost approximately $400 million, with at least half of that amount contributed by Sony.