Bring Out The Big Guns
Firewalk Studios was established in 2018 as a subsidiary of ProbablyMonsters in Bellevue, Washington, by veterans of game companies such as Bungie and Activision including former Activision executive Tony Hsu and former Bungie creative director Ryan Ellis and producer Elena Siegman, who worked on the Destiny franchise together. ProbablyMonsters collaborated with Sony with the establishment and growth of the studio, and the three companies announced their partnership in April 2021.
Firewalk’s first studio was located within the garage of ProbablyMonsters’ founder and chief executive officer, Harold Ryan, who previously served the same role within Bungie. According to Hsu and Ellis, Sony Interactive Entertainment showed interest in the studio’s work and supported them “from the beginning”. As part of the partnership, Sony wanted for Firewalk to operate separately from ProbablyMonsters’ other studios, so Ryan obliged by setting “a 1,500 square-foot building”, to create a “secure space”.
On April 22nd, 2021, it was formally announced that Sony and ProbablyMonsters signed a deal for the former to publish Firewalk’s first project for a ‘triple-A’ multiplayer title for the PlayStation 5. At the time of the partnership’s announcement, Firewalk Studios’ manpower was in the “upper double digits”, however Siegman would leave Firewalk in August 2022 to become the new studio head for Cold Iron Studios.
On April 20th, 2023, Sony announced its intentions to acquire Firewalk from ProbablyMonsters for an undisclosed sum. As part of the press release, Sony announced that Firewalk’s upcoming title will be in collaboration with fellow PlayStation subsidiaries Bungie and Haven Studios. At the time of the acquisition, Firewalk Studios had approximately 150 employees. In May 2023, Firewalk formally announced its new game as ‘Concord’.
Concord: 8 Years in the Making
A formal showing of Concord was shown in May 2024, followed by a planned release date of August 23rd 2024 for PlayStation 5. Set in a retro-futuristic sci-fi world inhabited by co-existing humans and humanoid aliens, it revolved around battles between teams of competing mercenaries. The game was developed over a total of eight years and on a reported US$400 million budget, although this figure was disputed by several PlayStation developers on social media.
Concord is a sci-fi player-versus-player first-person shooter game. The game featured a variety of alien characters, each with different abilities, such as robotic legs for high jumps and diamond skin for enhanced damage absorption. The game released with sixteen playable characters, and was planned to have free post-launch updates that would have added more characters and maps. The game would have featured new cutscenes about the characters and the ongoing story every week.
The game was intended as a flagship title by Sony, who believed it would eventually expand into a massive franchise with numerous spin-offs, however the game received mixed reviews from critics and experienced unprecedentedly low sales for a project of its size. A unnamed Concord developer would reveal to gaming podcast host Colin Moriarty, “An internal culture of workplace toxic positivity and a belief that it was impossible for the game to fail caused critical feedback to go ignored.”
On September 3rd, Sony announced that Concord would be taken offline and that all copies of the game that had been sold up to that point would be refunded, citing that “aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended” and that they would “explore options, including those that will better reach our players”. The game was delisted from digital storefronts, and the game’s servers went offline on September 6th, 2024, two weeks after its launch. In a statement, Concord director Ryan Ellis said that Firewalk would “explore options, including those that will better reach our players.”
The Price Of Failure
Due to the commercial failure of the game, game director Ryan Ellis announced to Firewalk’s staff that he would be stepping down from his role and move into a support role instead. One week after launch, the game ranked 40th on the PlayStation Store in terms of sales, with roughly 15,000 units sold on PlayStation. During its two weeks on the market, the game was reported to have grossed a total of $1 million. As a result of its disastrously low sales, Concord was put into the digital disasters exhibit at the Museum of Failure, an international exhibition for failed commercial products and services.
The redevelopment of Concord was cancelled, and on October 29th, Sony announced the closure of Firewalk Studios and the permanent halting of the game’s development, permanently halting their previous suggestion of improving aspects of the game. Sony would shut down Firewalk Studios on the same day, alongside another subsidiary company named Neon Koi who were developing live service mobile titles for the company.
The swift shutdown was attributed to several factors, including Concord’s failure to differentiate itself from established hero shooter games like Overwatch and Apex Legends, its lack of innovative gameplay mechanics, its generic character roster, and its poor map design. The game also faced criticism for being a full-priced release in a genre where most competitors are free-to-play, as well as its eight-year development cycle making it feel outdated upon release, with it struggling to align with evolving market trends and player expectations.
Firewalk’s closing statement on X (Twitter) would include the following comments:
“Firewalk is signing off one last time.”
“Firewalk began with the idea of bringing the joy of multiplayer to a larger audience.”
“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.”
