$200M before the Sony acquisition and $200M after. It’s a little hard to believe. The story seems to only be coming from Colin Moriarty right now, but I trust Jordan Middler to consider it at least reasonably plausible if he wrote it up for VGC.
This is absolute bullshit.
Firewalk, the studio that made Concord, used to be a part of a parent startup called ProbablyMonsters. Firewalk was sold to Sony last year, in April 2023.
ProbablyMonsters only had a total Series A investment of $250 million, and Firewalk was not the only studio that it was funding - it had multiple.
But let’s just say all $250mil went to Firewalk (of which is impossible because ProbablyMonsters still exists and has other studios). In order to hit this mythical $400mil figure, Sony would have had to spend $150mil in ONE YEAR.
The most significant cost of making a AAA game is paying for the developers, of which Firewalk has about 160 of them. In what world would Sony pay over 900k per developer to see Concord through to the finish line?
The more likely figure that each developer got paid on average is about 180k, that’s still just short of 30mil for 1 year.
Firewalk didn’t start with 160, so you can’t extrapolate that cost to its 8 years of development.
Don’t believe this horseshit.
They also outsourced a ton to make CG cut-scenes and such, which can rack up a bill very quickly. ProbablyMonsters was an incubator, not a parent company, as I understand it. I too am skeptical of there only being one source in Colin Moriarty, but I trust Jordan Middler to vet the story, even if he isn’t corroborating it, and as others have mentioned, the credits are literally over an hour long, which is evidence that supports the high costs.
I used to work at ProbablyMonsters. It’s most definitely not an incubator.
If you were in such a role that you could correct anything in the story, I’d encourage you to reach out to a journalist and do so.
So much money for a game I’ve never heard of
Or you could do a 60 fps bloodborne remaster that people would actually play for orders of magnitude less money, but what do I know I’m just a plebe who didn’t lose 400 million dollars
And then the other half of the Internet cries about how all they do are lazy remasters.
Actual insanity, they even poured 200 more after acquiring them to fix everything.
When are publishers going to realize there is only a market for like 2-3 Live service games at any one time?
You cannot underestimate the stupidity of games publishers. I’d be willing to accept that sunk-cost alone is the explanation for this outrageous budget. It probably started out as “what’s $200m for the next Fortnight?” and just went in $5 or $10 million dollar increments from there.
Everyone thinks they will have their own Apex, a game so good it could still carve out it’s place among the established behemoths.
I don’t understand why they don’t wait till the other ones die, like look at how successful marvel rivals beta was.
I’m hoping most of that money was spent on developers and salaries since it would appear they didn’t spend shit on advertising. Silver lining to a failure is that at least people had jobs for a good while
200m is bad enough
You’re telling me this cost more to develop than GTA V ?
…on what?
I could take one look at those models and animations and tell you it wasn’t cheap. Then probably a lot of money went into those CG cut-scenes that were intended to be rolled out weekly.
Just heard the story. Apparently it cost 200m by the point they presented the alpha and it was absolute crap. So Sony put another 200m into outsourcing the work asap to fix it.
Salaries and servers.
That’s rough, buddy
It didn’t cost 400 million. There’s no way a game like this can cost more than something like The Last of Us 2.
So funny story, people can waste a ton of money making something for way more than it should have cost.
8 years of development under multiple publishers will bleed a lot of money. They also hired on a lot of “experienced devs” from different game studios to head the different departments, and presumably paid them well enough to get them to leave their original companies.
8 years ago, it was just an idea. It was only in development for 4 years.
From what I understand, it actually started concept development 10 years ago, with 8 years of active development.
This is probably the biggest lesson against the gamer mindset of “Give the developers time to work, and they’ll polish it to a shine.” Sometimes, even time doesn’t improve the end product if the idea wasn’t great. It might even indicate that on some instances where publishers scrapped a ‘cool’ project that was in the works, it was actually the right call. It might have been a Concord waiting to happen.
Yeah, but we have seen a lot of examples where it was clearly a lack of time. An example would be the Gollum game. It had some very good concepts(making decisions between both of his personalities), but it didnt had any impact. This seems like something where if they had more time they could have formed this into a very good game mechanic.
Absolutely, and especially at a Corp as big as Sony, you have a lot of office politics in play also. Folks pushing personal agendas because it advanced their career.
The credits roll is like legit an hour and a half long. Id believe it.
Yeah it seems like the source is a podcast saying a number like after talking with a staff member of concord. I would have thought that people below executive/finance suite wouldn’t have that information. Not sure if they talked to someone in there but $400 million is just a bit steep.
Not impossible with tech salaries being what they are though, maybe it includes the buyout of the entire studio by Sony in that number though.
Hush, the accountants promised they’d fall for it!
