PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst wants the company to mitigate expensive risks with its future games, following last year’s high profile failure of live-service shooter Concord.
Speaking to Financial Times (via IGN), Hulst reflected on Concord’s failure in comparison to the huge success of mascot platformer Astro Bot. “I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply,” he said.
Playstation has now put into place more supervision of Sony’s owned studios, to ensure Concord’s fate isn’t repeated. “We have since put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing in very many different ways,” said Hulst. “The advantage of every failure…is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is.”
Analysts estimate Concord cost Sony around $250m, but was infamously shut down just two weeks after launch, resulting in the closure of its developer Firewalk Studio. Astro Bot, meanwhile, sold 1.5m copies in its first month and, by March this year, had sold 2.3m copies.