Sony Talks Concord’s Failure And The Hard Lessons Learned From It
The disastrous launch of Concord was the focus of a new interview with Sony president Hiroki Totoki, who spoke about how the company plans to avoid a repeat of this with future game releases. Part of Sony’s strategy will ensure that a game goes through a more rigorous period of testing and evaluation prior to it being released.
“Currently, we are still in the process of learning,” Hiroki said through an interpreter (via VGC) during a Q&A session following its latest financial earnings call. “And basically–with regards to new IP–of course you don’t know the result until you actually try it. 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.”
Hiroki added that Sony will also look at when it plans to launch a game, so as to avoid potentially cannibalizing sales between releases from its first-party studios and third-party partners.