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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Keza MacDonald

Pushing Buttons: the biggest flop in video game history caps off a brutal year for game development

A scene from Concord, a Playstation game shut down two weeks after launch.
Concord – the biggest flop of all time? Photograph: Sony Interactive Entertainment

It’s official: after Sony pulled its struggling hero shooter Concord from sale shortly after it launched, the studio that made it will now be closing. Firewalk Studios was bought by Sony less than two years ago, as part of a strategy to improve PlayStation’s live-service portfolio. The closure of Firewalk cements Concord’s place as one of the biggest and most consequential flops in gaming history: the cost to Sony will have been in the hundreds of millions, with estimates of Concord’s development cost ranging from $200m to $400m in total.

Sony also closed Neon Koi, a developer with offices in Helsinki and Berlin, which focused on “mobile action games with epic stories” but had yet to release a game.

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