Sony shutting down Seattle-area game developer Firewalk Studios
Sony on Tuesday announced the closure of Firewalk Studios, 18 months after acquiring the Bellevue, Wash.-based game developer.
Firewalk’s first and only project was Concord, a multiplayer action game for Windows and PlayStation 5 that released on Aug. 23. In a controversial move, Sony shut down Concord’s servers after only two weeks, citing poor sales and low player counts, and offered a refund to anyone who’d bought the game.
Sony announced Tuesday that it would “permanently sunset” Concord and shut down Firewalk Studios, as well as the German mobile developer Neon Koi.
“The PvP first person shooter genre is a competitive space that’s continuously evolving, and unfortunately, we did not hit our targets with [Concord],” wrote Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hermen Hulst in a company-wide email. “We will take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.”
An unknown number of employees in Washington state will be laid off. GeekWire has reached out to Sony for more details, and we’ll update this story if we hear back. Update: A filing with the Washington state employment department reveals that 174 jobs were cut at Firewalk as part of the closure.
Firewalk is signing off one last time.
— Firewalk (@FirewalkStudios) October 29, 2024
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:
– Navigate growing a new startup into a team during a global pandemic: Firewalk was…
Firewalk was founded in 2018 as the first of several teams created by ProbablyMonsters, a Bellevue, Wash.-based studio collective that aims to build a “sustainable, people-first culture” for video game development.
ProbablyMonsters sold Firewalk to Sony in April 2023 for an undisclosed sum. A month later, Firewalk revealed its debut project Concord as part of a PlayStation Showcase livestream.
When Concord released in August, however, Sony didn’t publicize the launch in any significant way. It also shipped Concord at a starting MSRP of $39.99 in a genre where many of its established competitors, such as Valorant and Overwatch 2, use a free-to-play business model.
At the end of the day, Concord was a new project from a small team with minimal publisher support up against a couple of 800-pound gorillas. It was also a “game as a service,” which is a notoriously overcrowded segment of the market. It’s not surprising that Concord sold poorly, but Sony’s rapid abandonment of the project is nearly unprecedented, which has led to widespread speculation by fans and analysts about whatever else might have happened behind the scenes.
“…While many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended,” wrote Ryan Ellis, director at Firewalk, on the official PlayStation blog in September. “Therefore, at this time, we have decided to take the game offline… and explore options, including those that will better reach our players.”
Firewalk’s closure is the latest in a series of layoffs and shutdowns that have plagued the larger video game industry for the last two years, with well over 10,000 employees losing their jobs over the course of 2024. This is widely seen as a painful global reset after the industry’s sudden growth in 2020-2021, which was largely driven by consumers’ entertainment spending habits during the COVID-19 lockdown.