Sony President, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki has shared his views on why Harmony was a failure.

During a Q&A session following its latest financial earnings call, Sony executives were asked many questions about the live service game, which was shut down 11 days after its launch.

Totoki explained that the company’s venture into live service gaming is still a learning process and that it needs to learn from what happened with Concord.

“At the moment we are still learning,” he said through an interpreter. “And basically, when it comes to new IP, of course, you don’t know the outcome until you actually try it.

“So for us, for our reflection, we probably need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the timing of those gates. And then we need to advance those, and we should have done those gates much earlier than we did.

“We also have a siled organization, so going outside the boundaries of those organizations in terms of development, and also sales, I think it could have been much smoother.

“And going forward, in our own titles and in third-party titles, we have many different windows. And we want to be able to choose the right and optimal window so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalization, so that we can maximize our performance when it’s about title launches. That’s all I have.”

Earlier in the call, Sony senior vice president of finance and IR Sadahiko Hayakawa noted the difference between the success of Helldivers 2 and the failure of Concord.

“We launched two live service games this year,” he explained. “Helldivers 2 was a big hit, while Concord ended up getting shut down. We got a lot of experience and learned a lot from both.

“We intend to share the lessons learned from our successes and failures across our studios, including in the areas of title development management as well as the process of continuously adding expanded content and scaling the service post-launch to strengthen our development management system.

“We intend to build on an optimal title portfolio during the current mid-range plan period that combines single-player games – which are our strengths and have a higher predictability of becoming hits due to our proven IP – with live service games that strive for upside at the same time as you take some risk in the release.”