Sony Closes Firewalk Studios, Permanently Cancels Concord
Firewalk Studios is the latest casualty of the woke backlash in the entertainment industry. Today, Sony announced on its Sony Interactive Entertainment website that they will close Firewalk Studios, the in-house studio through which they produced the first-person shooter Concord. They’re also getting rid of Neon Koi, a German developer of mobile games that Sony acquired in 2022 when it was called Savage Game Studios, and which was developing a “mobile action game” that is now defunct. Concord, which was supposed to be a tent pole release that Sony had hoped to turn into a franchise akin to Star Wars, with sequels, spin-offs, and merchandise, was a massive failure when it was finally released at the end of August, resulting in Sony taking the game offline and issuing refunds to anyone who bought it. Concord’s failure is clearly the reason Sony is shuttering Firewalk Studios; Sony all but said so in their announcement, and they revealed that Concord will remain offline and be put out to pasture, which means they consider the game beyond salvage (to use a Robert Ludlum term).
They’re probably right; Concord is essentially a punchline at this point, and Sony is wise to sweep it up and hope people forget about it quickly. As for Firewalk Studios, I don’t want to celebrate people losing their jobs, but when you hear about the development process for Concord, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where the studio stuck around. There were reports of a budget that was doubled during production, development taking an extra year because the game was not ready to be released at the end of its initial production schedule (the term “minimum viability” was used, meaning this thing must’ve been shoddier than a ship made of cardboard), and an atmosphere of “toxic positivity” in which no one on the development team was allowed to criticize any aspect of the game. If that’s how you handle your first big release, one that’s supposed to become the new face of your parent company, your days at your desk are numbered.
This is also an indication that big entertainment companies (and, hopefully, companies in all industries) are beginning to realize that they can not afford to suffer – or even embrace – woke crap. No one in their right mind thinks first-person shooter fans want to choose their pronouns and play as characters that emphasize diversity and body positivity. You can’t meld identity politics and woke lectures with shooting people with cool guns. They’re for different audiences, which the people who are supposed to know what gamers, moviegoers, comic book readers, and the like find entertaining have been determined to ignore. You can have some of these elements in video games; E. Honda is one of the famous characters from Street Fighter, and he’s a fat guy… because he’s a Sumo wrestler, and that’s part of the sport. There have been black characters and women in shooters, fighting games, action games, and all kinds of games forever, but they weren’t there to wag a finger at someone trying to have fun. Concord was the latest game (I say “was” because it was released two months ago, so it’s no longer the latest) to fight against the tide, and to the shock of no one, it got swept out to sea, as did the studio behind it. And, to stretch an analogy past its metaphorical physical limits, this feels like a turning tide, an admission that these attempts to force a square peg into a round hole can’t go on; they’re costing companies like Sony too much money and embarrassment. I’m sure some will hang on for as long as they can solely for ideological purposes, and there may be attempts to make the messaging more subtle (though I don’t know how many true believers are capable of subtlety), but if Sony is ditching an entire studio over it, I think it’s on its way out.
Let us know what you think of Sony closing Firewalk Studios in the comments!
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