Last month, we talked about Sony's 8-year-old 2billion game "Star Attack", which was a big hit, and it died violently when it was launched!! This game was short-lived and removed from the shelves within 12 days of its launch, and the service was refunded, which is really rare in the industry, and once caused an uproar! It was jokingly called "the fastest off the shelves legend" by netizens

The head of the World of Warcraft team said in an interview with the media last month that its development team, Firewalk Studio, may be rectified or even disbanded by Sony because of the failure of the "Star Attack" game. Sure enough, this sentence was immediately fulfilled!

October 30th

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) learned through an internal email sent by the CEO that

The company will officially cease operations

Worked on the first party of Agent Starring

Firewalk Studios!

It is displayed according to the information of the message

The closure of Firewalk Studios was largely attributed to the failure of its title, Starring Attack, to meet the expected player base; Over the past few months, Sony has struggled to find a viable option.

Despite this, Sony's announcement of the decision was accompanied by an email in recognition of the excellent results achieved by Screaming Attack in certain areas, and the gratitude of its team for their creativity and contributions.

Translation: Regarding Firewalk, as announced in early September, some aspects of Concord were excellent, but others didn't attract enough players, so we took the game offline. We've spent a lot of time exploring all the options over the past few months.

After much deliberation, we decided that the best course out was to discontinue the game permanently and close the studio. I want to thank everyone at Firewalk for their craftsmanship, innovation, and dedication.

Immediately afterward, Firewalk Studios' official Twitter account updated a statement confirming the change and suggesting that affected team members could seek help through PlayStation's recruitment channels, suggesting that most of the studio's employees may need to look for new career opportunities.

Translation: Firewalk's talent and expertise are truly world-class, and teams within Sony Interactive Entertainment and across the industry will be honored to work with them. If you are interested, please contact PlayStation's recruitment department. Thank you to all the team, partners, and fans for their support along the way.

Back in 2018, Firewalk Studios was founded with a team of industry elites, known as "a dream group that gathers the best in the shooter field"!

Members come from Bungie, Rebirth Studios, Raven Software, and more, including former Activision Destiny General Manager, former Bungie Creative Director, and former Harmonix and Irrational veterans Executive Producer at Games and Bungie. These development team members have worked on games such as Call of Duty, Destiny, Apex Legends, and Halo, as well as working at major companies such as EA and Activision.

In 2021, it established a partnership with Sony, and in 2023, during the critical period of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Sony and Microsoft had a dispute over the Call of Duty series and antitrust issues. Against this backdrop, Sony acquired Firewalk Studios, which is widely seen as an attempt to leverage the extensive experience of its members in multiplayer online shooters to strengthen its competitiveness in this field and compete with competitors. In the same year, Firewalk Studios officially launched their first project, Screaming Attack.

Everyone knows what happened later, next door "Black Myth: Wukong" is full of people, and the number of people online on Steam every day is still as high as more than 1 million! Agent Starming, on the other hand, has a high of 2,388 concurrent players on Steam and a low of 6. According to industry analysts, the digital version of this game has sold less than 25,000 copies, and the maximum number of simultaneous online players on Steam has not exceeded 700, and it is not even as many online players as the worst game of 2023, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum!!

From Sony's acquisition of Firewalk Studios in April 2023 to the recent announcement of its dissolution, the time span is only about a year and a half. After Starlight Attack ceased service, Sony has repeatedly stated that they are not abandoning the game and plan to bring it back to the public eye in some form. But now, this game is indeed completely "locked in a black room.......

In the internal email above, we can also see that mobile game studio Neon Koi is also shutting down.

Translation: Neon Koi will be shut down and its mobile action game will not continue to evolve. I would like to express my gratitude to everyone at Neon Koi for their hard work and endless passion for innovation.

In 2022, the studio was acquired by Sony to strengthen its mobile gaming strategy, and at the time it was still known as Savage Game Studios. By the end of 2023, the studio had its name changed. On top of that, a mobile action game originally developed by the studio for PlayStation will also be suspended!

That being said, players didn't show much regret about the dissolution of Firewalk Studios, and many still cited the game's overemphasis on "political correctness" as the main reason for the project's failure. But looking back at Firewalk Studios' history, we can see that the industry has gone through far more than just "politically correct" controversy. During this time, the studio also experienced the impact of the pandemic, changes in the industry landscape triggered by Microsoft's acquisition of Blizzard, a wave of layoffs in the gaming industry, and extremely fierce competition in the "hero shooter" genre.

In short, the journey of Firewalk Studios and Neon Koi is like a mission in the game, and now it's over. Players may think of it as a playthrough experience, but for other developers in the industry, this experience is more like a hidden level that allows everyone to see the pitfalls in the game's development path so that they can better avoid it.

That's all for today's article

Finally, I want to see the art materials of "Star Attack".

Private message "Star Singing Special Attack" Oh ~ There is a surprise ~

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