The latest foray into the live service space by Sony turned out to be a complete failure. Concord has gone away for good, and its development studio, Firewalk, has already been shuttered. Following the flop, Sony says it’s still learning about live service games and that Concord has given the company important lessons to follow in the future.

“With regards to new IP, of course, you don’t know the result until you actually try it,” says Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki (via VGC) regarding the company’s time with Concord. “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 organisation, so going beyond the boundaries of those organisations in terms of development, and also sales, I think that could have been much smoother.”

Totoki went on to say that Sony needs to work on finding the best window of time to launch games, both first and third-party, to make sure they don’t end up cannibalizing sales.

VGC also reported that Sony’s senior vice president for finance and investor relations, Sadahiko Hayakawa, had this to say about the difference between Helldivers 2 and Concord:

“We intend to share the lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management as well as the process of continually adding expanded content and scaling the service after its release so as to strengthen our development management system.

He had gone on to say that Sony will continue to focus on single-player games, “which are our strengths,” and has a higher chance of becoming hits while also pursuing live service experience even though their risks are much higher.