It is no longer news that Sony has shut down Firewalk Studios, the developer behind the bombed Concord franchise. Hours after the announcement of its closure, the studio shared a farewell message full of praises for what they had achieved.
“Firewalk is signing off one last time,” read the farewell message which was shared on LinkedIn and X. “Firewalk began with the idea of bringing the joy of multiplayer to a larger audience. Along the way we assembled an incredible team who were able to:
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“Navigate growing a new startup into a team during a global pandemic: Firewalk was founded in 2018 and was very small for its first couple years, only entering full Production in 2022.
“Build a new, customized next-generation FPS engine in Unreal 4 -> 5, delivering top-tier gameplay feel, beautiful worlds, and a performant 60fps technical experience on a stable and scalable backend on PS5 and PC to hundreds of thousands of players in our beta.
“Manage an acquisition / integration while readying technical and preliminary tests.
“And ultimately ship and deliver a great FPS experience to players- even if it landed much more narrowly than hoped against a heavily consolidated market.”
Firewalk also acknowledged that they took some risks, especially “marrying aspects of card battlers and fighting games with first-person-shooters” which did not all appeal to players. Nevertheless, they maintained that “the idea of putting new things into the world is critical to pushing the medium forward”.
How much Firewalk gulped on Concord allegedly revealed
According to Kotaku, citing internal sources familiar with the matter, Sony signed Concord during its early development for an initial $200 million. The sources claimed the amount was not enough to cover the game’s full development and also didn’t cover the acquisition of Concord IP rights.
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Months earlier, it was claimed that the live-service FPS shooter cost $400 million to make. One thing is for sure, Concord cost a lot of time and money to make and will go down as one of the biggest AAA flops in history.
In the farewell message, Firewalk called its employees “world-class” and said any studio would be fortunate to work with them.
