Firewalk Studios claims ‘hundreds of thousands’ played Concord beta

Yesterday, Sony made the decision to officially scrap development on Concord and shut down the studio behind it. In the aftermath, Firewalk Studios has released its own farewell letter.

Previous reports had claimed that Concord cost as much as $400 million over its lifetime, It turns out, that cost might be split amongst development, and the price Sony paid to acquire the company and Concord's IP rights. According to sources speaking with Kotaku, the initial development budget for Concord was $200 million, but then Sony spent more to acquire Firewalk Studios and the Concord IP.

In a farewell message posted on X, Firewalk Studios claims that “hundreds of thousands of players” took part in the Concord beta, but Steam data shows that, at least on the PC side, just a couple of thousand players tried the game. If the number Firewalk claims is accurate, then that would mean that ultimately, the game failed to convince enough of those hundreds of thousands of people to spend $40 on the game.

Here is the full statement from Firewalk:

“Firewalk began with the idea of bringing the joy of multiplayer to a larger audience. Along the way we assembled an incredible team who were able to: –

• Navigate growing a new startup into a team during a global pandemic: Firewalk was founded in 2018 and was very small for its first couple years, only entering full Production in 2022.
• Build a new, customized next-generation FPS engine in Unreal 4 -> 5, delivering top-tier gameplay feel, beautiful worlds, and a performant 60fps technical experience on a stable and scalable backend on PS5 and PC to hundreds of thousands of players in our beta.
• Manage an acquisition / integration while readying technical and preliminary tests. –
• And ultimately ship and deliver a great FPS experience to players- even if it landed much more narrowly than hoped against a heavily consolidated market.

We took some risks along the way – marrying aspects of card battlers and fighting games with first-person-shooters – and although some of these and other aspects of the IP didn’t land as we hoped, the idea of putting new things into the world is critical to pushing the medium forward.

The talent at Firewalk and the level of individual craft is truly world-class, and teams within Sony Interactive Entertainment and across the industry will be fortunate to work with them. Please reach out to Recruiting at PlayStation for inquiries, and thank you to all the very many teams, partners and fans who supported us along the way.”

Concord was essentially set up to fail. The game did not get the great reception Sony was hoping for during its initial reveal, and then we have to consider the fact that they wanted to sell the game at $40, ignoring the reality that the market is already dominated by high-quality free-to-play titles.

KitGuru Says: Concord was getting back-end updates on Steam just days ago, so some developers were very likely caught off-guard by this. It is also rare to see a studio shut down so soon after being acquired. Sony made the decision to by Firewalk in the first half of 2023, just before Concord's state of play reveal. 

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