Today, Sony announced they are shutting down two of the studios that they have acquired over the last few years.
In an email that was originally distributed internally to Sony owned companies, Hermen Hulst (the CEO of the Sony Studio business group) shared that they had decided to shut down Neon Koi, and Firewalk Studios. Both of these studios were acquired by Sony over the last few years, with Neon Koi (then going by Savage Games) acquired in 2022, and Firewalk Studios being acquired in 2023.
Firewalk Studios acquisition was part of a push towards live service games, with the company working to create Concord, which released this year to dismal reception. Infamously, Concord‘s reception was so bad that within weeks Sony was offering refunds to everyone for the game, and taking it off shelves while they pondered what to do. The decision seems to be to shutter the doors on Concord, and the people who made it completely.
The PvP first person shooter genre is a competitive space that’s continuously evolving, and unfortunately, we did not hit our targets with this title. We will take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area. – Herman Hulst
While Hulst’s letter mentions taking lessons from Concord, it is notably far from PlayStation’s first issue with the attempted push towards live service. There’s been a variety of issues with Bungie leading to repeated layoffs including only a few months ago, and them reducing the number of live service games that they aim to release in the next while.
Firewalk Studios released a statement on the social media outlet formerly known as Twitter about the closure, saying in part,
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.
Neon Koi’s acquisition was aimed at helping grow their mobile games business, an area that the company has been struggling to break into for a long time now. Consistently outshined by the Sony Music division in mobile games, which famously publishes Fate/Grand Order and set up it’s own publishing label called Unties. Meanwhile, Sony Interactive Entertainment had issues with Forwardworks, and with the shutting down of Neon Koi, it seems that the PlayStation Studios Mobile effort is off to similar issues. Sadly, Neon Koi never got to ship a game either under it’s original name or rebranding.
While mobile remains a priority growth area for the Studio Business, we are in the very early stage of our mobile efforts. To achieve success in this area we need to concentrate on titles that are in-line with PlayStation Studios’ pedigree and have the potential to reach more players globally. – Herman Hulst
Even while Sony has sold record numbers of games, we are seeing them continue a disturbing trend of video game layoffs. By May we were already over 10k layoffs, and the hits have only kept coming. Following the earlier shutdowns by Microsoft of Arkane Austin, and Tango Gameworks (among others), it serves as a reminder that an acquisition doesn’t mean the team is safe.
