Concord Flop Has Seen Sony Implement A Stricter Testing Process, Says Hermen Hulst
Sony Interactive Entertainment has implemented a stricter testing process for its games in order to avoid a failure on the scale of Concord last year, Hermen Hulst, the CEO Of PlayStation Studio Business Group has told the Financial Times.
Concord was released for PS5 and PC in August last year but was met with lukewarm reviews and crucially failed to attract much of an audience, resulting in Sony puling the game offline just a few weeks after launch. The format holder later confirmed that Concord would be shut down for good and its developed closed, despite taking a reported eight years and many millions to develop.
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As a result, Hulst has said that the console maker is now looking to avoid future failures of this magnitude, hoping to catch any potential problems early on in the development process.
I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply. We have since put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing in very many different ways. The advantage of every failure . . . is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is.
This isn’t the first time that Hulst has touched base on the inner workings of Sony’s review process for its products. Back in June, he revealed that Sony has ‘restructured the development and review process of our games,’ pledging not to repeat the same mistake twice.
[Source – The Financial Times via VGC]
