PlayStation Boss says Company is now “testing more strictly and more frequently” after Concord failed

After last year’s Concord failed and had a huge success with Astro Bot, PlayStation hopes to tweak its strategy to include fewer live service games, more large franchises, and strict oversight of the studios it owns.

In an interview Financial TimesPlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst said the company hopes to mitigate the big and expensive risks of the future with future games. “I don’t want the team to always play safely, but when we fail, I want to fail early and cheaply.”

Concord is not a cheap failure. Analysts estimate Sony spent about $250 million on the game, just for Sold badly That Sony Turn it off two weeks after launchand Close its developersnot long after, Firewalk Studios. By contrast, Astro Bot also launched Universal Aprain last year, winning multiple awards, and As of March 2025, 2.3 million copies were soldis one of the best-selling games on PlayStation 5.

The differences between the two games are of course countless, and their development stories are very different. But Hulst got rid of this and needed more oversight of the Sony-owned studios to ensure that games developed in the Concord direction were discovered before they became expensive failures so that they could be cancelled or corrected in time.

“Since then, we have conducted more rigorous and more frequent testing in many different ways,” Horst said. “The advantage of every failure…people now know the necessity of that (supervision).

The Financial Times spoke with several Sony studio leaders, who said that this oversight means more focus on group testing, more communication between internal Sony studios and closer relationships between studio senior executives. “If we are heading towards a giant mine, it's like a game made by another studio,” said Jason Connell, director of Ghost Art at YōteiStudio Sucker Punch.

The review is particularly frustrating given the failure of Concord, and analysts say this happens for a variety of reasons, including multiplayer, oversaturation of live service shooters. Hulster hinted in the interview that PlayStation is not planning to play live service games as before. That said, PlayStation does have Bungie's marathon before March 2026 Many fans of Bongi who follow Among them Delay,,,,, Employee layoffsand there is a general lack of information about the game brings.

But Hulster wants to pursue another strategy: he wants more, huge Sony IP. The success of Astro Bot has achieved success in multiple gameplay, and each time the robot icon becomes more and more popular. According to the Financial Times , Hulster Hope Studios are considering how to become a bigger and bigger franchise over time, following in the footsteps of the last of us and the unknown. “We took a very intentional approach to creating IPs…to understand how the new concept becomes the iconic series of PlayStation and then again become a franchise for people outside the game,” he said.

Currently, PlayStation has the ghost of Yōtei, this year's soul has lost its soul, with Marvel Tōkon: Battle Soul and Housemarque's 2026 Saros.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior journalist at IGN. You can find her post on bluesky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Is there a story tip? Send it to [email protected].