Sony’s Concord, a $40 live service shooter designed to cater to “modern audiences” with its progressive, inclusive, and ugly characters, met a swift demise. The game was pulled just two weeks after its release due to dismal player numbers in a saturated market of hero shooters.
Despite Sony’s $200 million investment in Concord, which included themed PlayStation 5 controllers that indicated the company had high hopes for the franchise, Hiroki Totoki, Sony’s CFO, hypocritically proclaimed that the PlayStation brand lacks sufficient original IPs.
Totoki told the Financial Times that Sony’s lack of original IP, intellectual property created entirely in-house, is a significant issue for the company. In response, Sony is planning a “multibillion” dollar investment to develop more original IPs, aiming to drive a “creation shift” within the company.
This shift includes launching more live service online shooters like Fairgame$ and Marathon, which are likely to face similar challenges as Concord as these new titles feature character designs that many find unattractive and overly fixated on “inclusivity” by focusing on androgynous and masculine characters of color that may or may not come with pronouns.
“Whether it’s for games, films or anime, we don’t have that much IP that we fostered from the beginning. We’re lacking the early phase (of IP) and that’s an issue for us.”
Totoki further explains that while the company has been successful in bringing existing popular IPs to new audiences such as through PlayStation’s efforts to expand into the PC market by outright demanding PC gamers adopt PlayStation Network accounts for single-player titles, Sony and PlayStation apparently will not experience significant growth unless they begin creating brand new original IPs from scratch.
It’s quite ironic that Sony laments a lack of original IPs when they seem more focused on pushing industry plant mascots, like Ellie from Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us and Aloy from Guerrilla Games’ Horizon series, as if they were major icons. Today’s Sony is notably devoid of standout characters that truly represent the PlayStation brand.
The irony is even more pronounced given that Concord, one of Sony’s brand new IPs that the company had high hopes for is being shut down less than two weeks after its launch. Meanwhile, Astro Bot, a game featuring a makeshift company mascot that supposedly celebrates the history of PlayStation is set for release in just a few days.
As the saying goes, what goes up must eventually come down. Sony once boasted a rich history of beloved company mascots and original IPs, with characters like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon being iconic examples.
However, in the past decade, Sony has increasingly interfered with Japanese developers, imposing censorship on games with heteronormative content and fanservice in favor of globalist, LGBT-focused policies.
This has led to the downfall of Marvelous’ Senran Kagura franchise, with the upcoming release of 7EVEN being heavily altered and compromised. The series creator left Marvelous over these issues, leaving the game in limbo for years.
Senran Kagura is just one of many third-party franchises that was once exclusive to the PlayStation ecosystem, much like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot. Sony has been notably silent about their decision to close Japan Studio in April 2021. This studio was responsible for beloved IPs like Ape Escape, Knack, Patapon, LocoRoco, and Gravity Rush, all of which are exclusive to PlayStation.
Sony’s decision to shut down Japan Studio and merge its remnants with Team Asobi, the team behind Astro’s Playroom has tarnished decades of history. Their latest effort come off as being desperate as Sony continues to push Horizon’s Aloy, whose character is that of an overweight androgynous lesbian as an industry staple with a Lego themed spin-off title.
In addition to closing the studio responsible for Ape Escape and Gravity Rush, Sony has seemingly abandoned other iconic franchises like Infamous, Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, PaRappa the Rapper, and even Bloodborne. These once-celebrated IPs have largely been neglected in favor of progressive, narrative-driven experiences, with the occasional new creations like Days Gone which are snubbed and ignored.
Sony’s substantial investment in acquiring Bungie to produce live service garbage instead of revitalizing classic franchises such as Resistance or Killzone, the latter last seen in 2013 as a PlayStation 4 launch title. Sony has chosen to focus on developing a live service multiplayer extraction shooter with their purchase, dubbed “Marathon.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: modern video game development is no longer financially viable. The industry has been deeply entrenched by liberal women who snuck their way into the industry during the feminist movement.
Today, video game development extensively caters to DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives, both in hiring practices and in the content of the products produced. DEI focuses on prioritizing applicants from “marginalized” backgrounds such as transgender individuals, disabled people and non-binary individuals over those with proven merit and qualifications simply because they may be White men and the industry doesn’t “progress” by having those anymore.
The industry is flooded with individuals who strongly advocate for DEI and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) ideologies, often at the expense of quality and work efficiency. These hires, with their inferior skills compared to their predecessors, contribute to prolonged development times and inflated costs, which lead to significant financial losses for the companies who’ve failed to manage budgets effectively as games need to sell millions of units just to make back their investment.
For example, BioWare’s upcoming game Dragon Age: The Veilguard is helmed by a “queer trans female” director, who has openly touted that the game will feature nudity and revolve around pansexual romances with a progressive, aesthetically challenged cast of companions.
Meanwhile, Sony’s first-party studios continue to burn through hundreds of millions of dollars on AAA titles like The Last of Us Part II, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Horizon Forbidden West, each costing around $200 million to develop. Sony’s now-canceled live-service shooter Concord allegedly took eight years to develop, with a budget comparable to Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
Sony, like other major gaming companies, Microsoft, Tencent, Square Enix, and Ubisoft are bleeding money by pushing these progressive ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) initiatives, imposing self-censorship in an effort to appeal to a fractional, non-existent audience.
This strategy, focused on inclusive design and pandering to modern trends, results in products that alienate actual gamers. Rather than abandon these ineffective tactics, these companies continue doubling down, producing commercial failures one after another while gaming journalists vilify critics as “racist” for pushing back.
It’s ironic that we’re supposedly “not the target demographic” for these games, yet they can’t survive without our money. Hiroki Totoki is completely out of touch, especially when Sony has barely produced any games in recent years. This current console generation has been the most barren in PlayStation’s history.
Sony has a vast library of original IP at their disposal, but they’ve neglected and abandoned practically every single one of them in favor of progressive and inclusive characters that are of the LGBT variety.
They outright shuttered Japan Studio, which had been creating iconic franchises for PlayStation since the beginning. Fans have been eager for a continuation or HD re-release of Gravity Rush, but instead, its developers were let go and reassigned as Sony funneled resources into progressive, “woke” projects like Concord, a game that should have been aborted upon being pitched.
Sony’s disregard for its own original IP is becoming more evident as they move forward with a poorly conceived Gravity Rush movie adaptation, tarnishing a beloved franchise. Similarly, Twisted Metal, which hadn’t seen a release since 2012, was inexplicably funded for a live-action TV series that ended up flopping.
Sony’s credibility is in shambles, they’ve consistently failed to deliver games, and now, as the PS5 is being phased out after underwhelming sales since its release, the company has taken another hit by hiking the PS5’s price in Japan, the very country they abandoned when Sony Interactive Entertainment relocated to California.
This move coincided with their shift away from developing iconic IPs that once defined PlayStation, instead focusing on censoring Japanese games featuring attractive anime characters while pushing progressive interactive movies and live service titles that gamers are becoming increasingly more frustrated with.