Today, Sony released its Q2 2024 financial report, revealing that the PlayStation 5 had reached 65.5 million units and that the quarter’s performance was good enough to warrant an upgrade to its full-year forecast for the gaming segment.

Following the report, investors are used to seeing PlayStation Co-CEO Hiroki Totoki talking about several hot topics. Speaking about Concord’s failure, which led to the waste of more than $200 million spent on the project and the closure of developer Firewalk Studios last week, he said (quote via GamesRadar):

Currently we are still in the learning process. Basically, with regards to new IPs, of course you won’t know the results until you actually try them. So for us, for our reflection, we may need to have a lot of gates, including user testing or internal evaluation, and the runtime of those gates. And then we need to get ahead of it, and we should have completed those gates much earlier than we did. Plus, we have an isolated organization, so going beyond the boundaries of that organization in terms of development, and also sales, I think it can be a lot smoother.

Totoki also spoke about PC gamers’ resistance to Sony’s strict requirements for creating PlayStation Network accounts on games like God of War Ragnarök and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. The executive acknowledged that users have not been happy with the policy, but he emphasized the need to ensure security in live service games through PSN account requirements:

We have learned a lot. How to deal with PC problems, for example. The PlayStation accounts we offer – in fact, offering them, for example, sometimes tends to invite resistance. But for live service games, to maintain game order so that anyone can enjoy the game safely, we need to create a conducive environment and, of course, enjoy the game freely. It has some restrictions, maybe it can’t be called rules, but asks users and gamers to follow etiquette, etiquette is very important and we must continue to look for the best way to achieve this.

The problem is, neither game is a live service title. It was a single-player game, and PC gamers didn’t understand why they had to create a PSN account to play a title that didn’t even have any online functionality.