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PS5 Pro Price Hasn’t Had A “Negative Impact” On Sales

Sony’s Hiroki Totoki asserts that the $700 price tag attached to the PS5 Pro, which also sells special attachments like the disc drive separately while not working with existing PS5 faceplates, hasn’t had a negative impact on the console as “hardcore users” are the demographic of the mid-gen refresh.

Spotted by Genki, the exec expressed that he — and the company itself isn’t too worried about the price and how the console isn’t selling poorly.

The console itself is faltering in terms of the standard rounds consoles face with scalpers. Whereas scalpers jumped at PS5 flipping during the chip shortages and even bled into the PlayStation Portal, the PS5 Pro’s ROI is significantly less, leading to early scalpers selling the console for market value or even slightly less just to get it off their hands.

Sony Abruptly Shuts Down Concord Dev

Concord

Concord developer Firewalk Studios has been shut down by Sony after the failure that was its debut game. Following rumors of the botched hero shooter going free-to-play and the game being a $400 million money pit were definitely signs of its fate.

In a lengthy email sent out by CEO Herman Hulst, it discussed changes to the PlayStation Studios family — singling out Firewalk alongside mobile dev Neon Koi. It touched on the shuttering of the game, that it did things well, but didn’t catch on to other features.

This ultimately led to the game sunsetting and now we know the studio’s closure. Supposedly, this turned into a learning experience for Sony and the live service market.

“Regarding Firewalk, as announced in early September, certain aspects of Concord were exceptional, but others did not land with enough players, and as a result we took the game offline.  We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options.   

After much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio.   I want to thank all of Firewalk for their craftsmanship, creative spirit and dedication.  

The PvP first person shooter genre is a competitive space that’s continuously evolving, and unfortunately, we did not hit our targets with this title. We will take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.”

Concord itself lasted less than a month before Sony pulled the plug on its premium hero shooter after a lackluster launch. As for the studio, it was founded in 2018 under ProbablyMonster before getting sold off to Sony last year.

PlayStation Stars Running Into Issues In The UK

PlayStation Stars

The problem child service that PlayStation Stars seems to be borked in the UK at this time. Residents can’t seem to redeem points for cash off transactions.

The free-to-join service lets gamers earn rewards for playing games and also purchasing new ones with some instances providing monetary value to your next transaction. As Push Square points out, though, it seems to be running into technical difficulties or at the very least heavily nerfed for UK players who are currently unable to redeem points for dollars off their purchases.

Notably, US and other regions seem unaffected by the problem, though, it’s suspected to be tied to the recent policy barring members from using their points on PlayStation Plus subscriptions.

Ex-PlayStation Boss Claims Lack Of Hits Led To Japan Studio Closure

Japan Studio

Ex-PlayStation boss, Shawn Layden, has laid down the brass tax as to why Japan Studio was closed down. It mainly boils down to a lack of smash-hit games post-PS3 era.

Speaking with IGN, the former PS bigwig asserted that the studio didn’t release hit games for a “while.” Chalking it up to the PS3 era, it was hard for major studios that made waves in the PS1 and PS2 spaces to keep that same momentum on the next console and if they did, they were just lucky.

“That was sad. It wasn’t necessarily a surprise. I love Allan [Becker, former head of Japan Studio], and he worked really hard, but there was so much legacy malaise. It’s tough when a studio hasn’t had a hit for a while, then they forget how that feels. You know, if you have a hit once it’s it’s like a drug, man, you’re chasing the next one, right? And then if you don’t have that for a while, you forget what it felt like, and then you start to forget how to get there.”

Later in the interview, he associated the whole situation to pruning a bonsai, as it’s all about bringing it back to square one and growing it back up again. Meanwhile, he touches on studios like Capcom and Bandai Namco as being in a good spot while others like Square Enix and Konami are struggling.

“But, you know, Capcom is prosecuting that problem fairly directly. I think Sega finds itself in a pretty good place. Bandai Namco has got some refactoring to do. Koei Tecmo has its market, owns that market, and they seem happy with that…How many different versions of FF7 have been made?! Square Enix. I think when they abandoned their overseas developer/publisher ambitions and brought it back to home truths, that was a good move for them, but it’ll still take a while for them to get out of the woods.”

Bungie Joins PlayStation To Support All First-Party Live Service Games

Bungie

Bungie Creative Studios has joined PlayStation Studios to build the foundation and a creative team to support future first-party live service games.

Senior director, Bridget O’Neill, took to LinkedIn to firstly announce the move and her new position as the senior director at PlayStation Studios.

It’s frankly not too shocking that Sony is looking at reaping the benefits of a studio that has been in the live service market for so long. By and large, the model has been vital to Bungie’s work since the original Destiny launched in 2014.

In 2022, PlayStation bought the studio for that specific reason, after all, Sony continues to strive to make waves — and is currently failing — in the live service market. A mere year after the acquisition, Bungie faced round of layoffs, as well as eliminating 220 roles earlier this year, with 155 roles integrated into Sony itself.