PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst has shared how Sony is implementing measures to minimise the impact of failures like Concord, and to maximise the growth of successful, original IP.
“I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply,” Hulst told The Financial Times.
“We have since put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing in many different ways. The advantage of every failure […] is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is.”
Hulst said that the “number of [live services releases] is not so important” for PlayStation for now. Instead, he highlighted the importance of “having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities”.
In particular, he wants studios to focus on creating IPs that can be turned into transmedia franchises like The Last of Us.
“We take a very intentional approach to IP creation […] understanding how a new concept can turn into an iconic franchise for PlayStation, that can then become a franchise for people beyond gaming,” said Hulst.
Last November, Sony president Hiroki Totoki said the firm was “still in the process of learning” in regards to live service games following the failure of Concord.
The title was pulled from sales two weeks after launch following low sales, which subsequently led to the closure of Firewalk Studios.
“With regards to new IP, of course, you don’t know the result until you actually try it,” said Totoki. “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.
“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.”
Sony’s senior vice president for finance and investor relations Sadahiko Hayakawa added:
“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.