Sony Risks Walking Into Another Concord With Haven Studios' Fairgames

And while this could certainly be true for Haven Studios' debut title Fairgame$, you could make the exact same argument for Concord.

Keep in mind that Sony bought Firewalk and spent more than $100 million to make the poster child for how not to chase video game trends even though the studio hasn't released a game yet. Do you know what other studio Sony bought with zero track record with hit titles? Haven Studios.

To make matters worse, arguably the only thing that Fairgames$ and Haven Studios have going for it is its founder, who helped build Ubisoft Toronto and Motive Studio, aiding in the creation of Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs—Raymond left the sinking ship that is Ubisoft just in time to avoid its worst quarter in years.

On a similar note, Firewalk's team is made up of people who previously worked at Bungie and Destiny, which kind of explains why many are referring to the soon-to-be-defunct game as a more PvP-focused version of Destiny.

As you can see, there's a pattern forming between Fairgame$ and Concord here and it's not looking good for the former.

We don't know what went behind the scenes with Concord and why what happened, well, happened, but we can only assume that the internal discourse about Concord was also positive. Sony has no way of controlling the narrative once the game goes public, and it certainly couldn't have predicted that it would go as badly as it did, even though there were signs during the initial open beta test.

Also, many games that came out in recent years that fell flat at launch enjoyed similar if not better internal reception. Redfall is a good example of this. In fact, it's very rare for companies to admit that they canceled in-development games because the in-house talent felt it wasn't good enough, similar to what happened with The Last of Us' multiplayer spin-off last year.

The only consolation here is there's talent at Haven Studios, and Sony should have some takeaways from what made Concord work. Given how closely PlayStation's first-party studios work together, Fairgame$ can learn from the good things that came out of Concord, like its gunplay, among other things.

Given how Payday 3 failed to give fans a proper sequel to Payday 2 and The Finals couldn't keep up with the initial wave of momentum, Fairgame$ can carve itself a spot in the criminally underserved third-person PvPvE heist genre.

But if it doesn't, at least there's still Marathon and Guerilla Games' Horizon MOBA spin-off.