In a move that will shock absolutely no one to the core, parent company Sony Interactive Entertainment will be shutting down the makers of Concord, as well as another studio that is working on a Sony-exclusive mobile game.

Developer Firewalk Studios and Neon Koi will be shut down. This means that the delisted and already-offline shooter Concord will be permanently sunset. Concord was active on 23 August and for two weeks before it went offline, most likely due to very low player count and, well, everything else about it quality-wise. This also means that Neon Koi’s mobile action game will cease development.

These decisions were made by Sony’s top brass, with Sony Interactive Studio Business Group CEO Hermen Hulst being forefront for these decisions.

Here is Firewalk Studio’s possibly last Twitter post on their official account:

Firewalk is signing off one last time.

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 founded in 2018 and was very small for its first couple years, only entering full Production in 2022.
– Build a new, customized next-generation FPS engine in Unreal 4 -> 5, delivering top-tier gameplay feel, beautiful worlds, and a performant 60fps technical experience on a stable and scalable backend on PS5 and PC to hundreds of thousands of players in our beta.
– Manage an acquisition / integration while readying technical and preliminary tests.
– And ultimately ship and deliver a great FPS experience to players- even if it landed much more narrowly than hoped against a heavily consolidated market.

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. See you in the Tempest.

– Firewalk Studios

Firewalk is signing off one last time.

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 (@FirewalkStudios) October 29, 2024

It’s tough to see a promising bunch of companies getting axed like this. We would like to wish everyone on these teams the best and to hopefully land on their feet.