Following the super-fast closure of hero shooter Harmony and the following closing of Firewalk Studios, you simply know the entire mess was going to come back up on the subsequent monetary presentation for Sony. With shops estimating Sony’s funding at numbers as excessive as $200 million and the sport not making it mere weeks after launch, buyers would possibly simply have a number of questions.
Would Sony “study” from Harmony? If that’s the case, would they study the appropriate classes?
Effectively, diving into the investor presentation and Q&A name, I would personally put the solutions at “sure, and largely no” in my guide.
With regards to Harmony particularly, Sony Senior VP Sadahiko Hayakawa mirrored on that launch in comparison with the gorgeous success of Helldivers 2 saying, “”We launched two live-service video games this 12 months. Helldivers 2 was an enormous hit, whereas Harmony ended up being shut down. We gained plenty of expertise and discovered quite a bit from each. We intend to share the teachings discovered from our successes and failures throughout our studios, together with within the areas of title growth administration in addition to the method of regularly including expanded content material and scaling the service after its launch in order to strengthen our growth administration system.”
CFO/COO Hiroki Totoki additionally expressed the significance of earlier person testing together with different “gates” the studio might be utilizing to enhance merchandise. “We most likely have to have plenty of gates, together with person testing or inner analysis, and the timing of such gates. After which we have to deliver them ahead, and we should always have executed these gates a lot sooner than we did.”
Certain, these are each pretty classes to study. Nevertheless, there are a number of studios that won’t get that probability since Sony shut them down…together with Harmony’s personal Firewalk Studios.
Whereas the corporate will proceed to concentrate on some live-service choices, it additionally takes away what I feel is one other “dangerous lesson” and said a concentrate on “confirmed IPs.” From the report, “We intend to construct an optimum title portfolio through the present mid-range plan interval that mixes single-player video games, that are our power, and which have a better predictability of changing into hits resulting from our confirmed IP, with reside service video games that pursue upside whereas taking over a certain quantity of danger upon launch.”
I am not saying that every one of their classes aren’t legitimate to a point, however there’s WAY extra at play right here that is not lined underneath the “see, once you work with an unknown/new IP that is what can occur.” Certain, the IP for Harmony was boring to me (and lots of others), however that wasn’t the rationale this flopped. Hell it could barely make the highest 3 causes.
Both method, I hate classes that get summed up with the thought of “see this is the reason you do not take dangers” in an trade that requires dangers be taken to maneuver the artwork ahead. Perhaps that is simply me, although.
