Last year, Sony PlayStation’s fizzling push into live service hit both its apex with the successful release of “Helldivers 2,” and its nadir with the disastrous launch of “Concord”.
Eight years and $400 million spent in the development of “Concord” led to the game launching with just 25,000 copies sold in its first few weeks – bad enough that Sony pulled the title from sale just over two weeks after launch and offered refunds to all players who bought it.
Has the company learned its lesson from that disaster? Not entirely. PlayStation’s Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst spoke with The Financial Times recently and said the mistake wasn’t doing live service, it was spending to much and not enough vetting.
As a result, a stricter and more thorough testing process has been put in place to make sure potential problems with live service titles are spotted far earlier in the development process:
“I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply. We have since put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing in very many different ways. The advantage of every failure . . . is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is… What is important to me is having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities.”
Some of these new measures include more of a focus on group testing, learning from other Sony teams, and building closer relationships between executives who play these games.
The comments follow on from Sony CFO Lin Tao earlier this month, who said, despite the negativity surrounding Sony’s live service offerings, she still believes live service games are worthwhile.
Next for Sony on the live service front is Bungie’s “Marathon” reboot which has faced a large amount of pre-release negative criticism.
