Sony officially shuts down Firewalk Studios after Concord’s failure

Sony has confirmed that Firewalk Studios, the developer behind the tragically short-lived live-service shooter Concord, is being closed down, along with one of its Germany-based mobile games development studios, Neon Koi. The announcement of Firewalk’s closure comes a few weeks after the studio’s director, Ryan Ellis, reportedly resigned from his role and after its debut title, Concord, was shut down after about two weeks following its launch due to disastrously low sales and concurrent player numbers.

In an internal memo sent from Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Herman Hulst to employees, it was announced that “we have had to make a difficult decision relating to two of our studios – Neon Koi and Firewalk Studios“. The memo advises that Neon Koi will be closed, and the mobile action game that the studio was working on will not be moving forward. Regarding Concord and Firewalk Studios, the memo confirms that Sony will “permanently sunset” the game, along with closing the studio. This puts a damper on some hopes that Concord might make some sort of revival one day, perhaps with a free-to-play business model to make the game more approachable.

Concord’s failure marked one of the most high-profile video game commercial failures. It was a major first-party Sony IP given a large portion of a State of Play presentation when it was fully revealed. Upon its release in August 2024, it unfortunately utterly failed to reach a sustainable audience. The game was then closed within weeks, with all sales being refunded to players. According to some internal sources as per a Kotaku report, Sony reportedly spent around $200 million on purchasing the studio and financing Concord’s development, while the game only sold around 25,000 copies. As such, despite how poorly Concord did commercially, it is surprising that Sony wouldn’t try and further recoup at least some of that investment with a free-to-play relaunch, or something of that nature.

Curiously, the Concord-themed level in Amazon Prime Video’s upcoming anthology TV series, Secret Level, will reportedly still be aired despite the game’s failure. With the Concord game being permanently shuttered, this will likely mark the last official use of the Concord IP, unless Sony decides to bring it back for some reason. Regarding the affected employees at Firewalk and Neon Koi, Sony confirms that it “will work to find placement for some of those impacted within our global community of studios where possible“. With the game industry being rocked by waves of layoffs over the past few years, these are far from the only studios facing closures lately. Hopefully the impacted developers at Firewalk and Neon Koi will find new work before long.