2024 has undeniably been a good year for Sony.

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, Astro Bot, Black Myth: Wukong, God of War: Ragnarok and Silent Hill 2 are all exclusive on consoles to the PlayStation 5 and are all gunning for Game of the Year for 2024. In the background, Sony has released two new iterations of their console, slimming down the frame with the Slim and upgrading the internals with the Pro.

This year was critical for Sony’s standing in the ninth generation of consoles, firmly outpacing the XBox as Microsoft struggles to secure major exclusives and even giving Nintendo a run for their money in some quarters as the Switch approaches what is likely its final year on the market.

Obviously this success ignores September’s catastrophe that was Concord. Actually, calling it September’s catastrophe, since the game was in development for eight years to the tune of $400 million. Interestingly enough, it cost less money to develop the Concorde jet than it did to develop the Concord game, and yet the hero shooter was online for less than three weeks.

The idea was for Concord to give the PlayStation 5 a hit online multiplayer exclusive, something the console still does not quite have. Firewalk Studios game director Ryan Ellis implied in his announcement of Concord‘s discontinuation that the studio would work to improve and rerelease Concord in a better state. But at this point, so late in the year and with so much success for the PlayStation brand, does it not make sense to take the resources that would have gone into saving Concord and instead use it to continue releasing new successful games?

That is not to say that Concord is beyond saving. According to Steam logs, Concord has been getting updates recently, confirming that Firewalk is actively working to save the project. And it is not unheard of for bad games to receive updates which change the perception of the game as a whole. Most famously, No Man’s Sky went from a boring and repetitive and underwhelming experience at launch to a rich, widely lauded experience thanks to the diligent multiyear efforts of Hello Games. To a lesser extent, Bethesda has taken the disaster that was Fallout 76 and progressively improved it to the point where Fallout fans were far more accepting of the game.

The difference between the above examples and Concord was that the success of No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76 were crucial for the survival of their publishers, mostly because the publishers were also the developers in both situations. Concord, meanwhile, clearly means very little to Sony’s success this generation. There is exponentially less financial incentive for Sony to invest millions of dollars more into reviving their failed project and then remarketing it to win back fans than there was for Hello Games or Bethesda. Sony’s money is better spent acquiring and funding more exclusives, which would almost certainly generate more money given the absence of poor public perception.

It would certainly be nice to see Concord get a second chance. Developers on Twitter have excitedly shared which elements of the game they worked on, and they certainly seem passionate about the project. But video games are a business, and the hard truth is that Sony does not need Concord like Concord needs Sony.