There are already two Huge questions remain unanswered harmonyan expensive PlayStation 5 hero shooter that almost no one has played. The first is: How does a game do that? Not caught or bad Is the bomb so spectacular? The second question is: How did a game that seemed destined to fail pass the quality checks Sony is known for setting the standard for modern gaming blockbusters? Company President Hiroki Totoki attempted to answer the latter question during a conference call with earnings analysts on Friday.
The chief operating officer directly responsible for Sony’s PlayStation business offers four thoughts on what happened harmonyand how companies can do things differently in the future. First, he suggested that PlayStation needs to check in early in the development process to determine if things are on track. Second, the company was too siled when working on new projects, requiring more communication between teams. 3. Release time harmony Could be particularly bad. Finally, even if everything is done correctly, there are risks associated with real-time multiplayer.
Here are Totoki’s full comments via Sony translation during today’s second-quarter earnings call:
At present, we are still in the process of learning. Basically, for IP, the results can only be known after actually trying it. So for us, in order to reflect, we probably need to have a lot of levels, including user testing and user evaluation, and the timing of those levels, and we need to bring them forward, and we should complete these levels earlier than we did.
And we do have a siled organization, so both development and sales are outside the boundaries of those organizations, and I think that’s probably going to be smoother.
Looking at our first party games and our third party games, we do have a lot of different windows and we want to be able to select the right and best ones so that we can deploy them on our own platform without cannibalization so that We can then maximize the performance of header launch.
harmony Launched back in August, it has struggled to capture player attention – a death sentence for a live-service game that relies in part on a healthy player pool to reduce matchmaking times , and give players confidence that the games they invest in will win. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened after Sony took the unprecedented step of releasing the hero shooter a few weeks later. The game has signed a preliminary development agreement my city reported before $200 million in funding has been refunded in full, and Firewalk Studios, the team behind it, was disbanded in a massive layoff last month.
“PvP first-person shooters are an evolving competitive space, and unfortunately we didn’t achieve our goals with this game,” PlayStation co-CEO Hermen Hulst said at the time. “We will learn lessons harmony and continue to enhance our real-time service capabilities to enable future growth in this area. Firewalk plans to lay off 170 developers, bringing Sony’s total gaming layoffs this year to 1,290.
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