Concord was a disaster for PlayStation, I think we can all agree. It’s launched was greeted with apathy and a remarkably small amount of players, and just a week later PlayStation removed it from sale entirely and refunded everyone who had bought it.
Now, amidst reports that the game’s director is stepping down and the studio is in “limbo”, some new information has surfaced which paints Concord in an even worse light.
The news comes via Colin Moriarty of Sacred Symbols who posted a 9 minute long clip from the latest episode of Sacred Symbols on his X account. Moriarty previously worked as a journalist at IGN and broke numerous stories during his time there, but these days typically doesn’t break stories unless someone actively contacts him with information, which is the case here.
According to Colin, someone from worked on Concord contacted him to share inside information. Colin claims to have verified who he was, his position and apparently talked to him extensively. Toward the end of the clip he describes the source as being “totally solid” which is why he feels confident in presenting the information given to him.
Colin says that, “the reason I wanted to talk about it is because some of the assumptions that I had made about the game were dead wrong, as far as how much it cost and how much Sony really lost on it.”
“So the big thing you really need to know here about this ” said Colin on the latest episode of Sacred Symbols, “is that Concord cost about $400 million to make.”
Toward the end of the clip, Colin confirms that this massive figure does not include the cost to actually buy the studio.
“In the first quarter of 2023 Concord had basically entered into Alpha state. This was before Sony had even purchased the team, but Sony had been working with ProbablyMonsters- the original owners of Firewalk – and Firewalk probably since late 2020, early 2021 at the latest on Concord.” Colin explains, before saying that by this point around $200m had been spent on the game.
“It’s unclear how much of that money is from ProbablyMonsters and the original investors, and how much of that money is from Sony.” said Colin.
However, from Q1 to launch, Colin’s source claims Sony spent another $200m on the game, bringing us to that mind-boggling $400m figure.
“The scuttlebutt behind the scenes about Concord is that the game was in a laughable shape when it was shown.” said Colin.
“It was in such horrible shape that Sony felt like they needed to spend that much money again – so $200 million plus $200 million – to get the game to the MVP status, not to the status of it being a great game, to get it to just viability.”
The MVP status to which Colin refers stands for Minimum Viable Product, a term used in business to describe the point at which a product reaches the minimum at which the developers would be comfortable selling it.
Colin goes on to say that a lot of the extra $200m came from having to outsource work to other studios to finish the game. This includes two aspects of the game that simply weren’t worked on prior to it being shown in its Alpha state: Onboarding, and monetization.
Based on what he knows, Colin says he thinks Concord is Sony’s most expensive game to date. Of course, that’s based purely on the $400 development budget, of which Sony’s portion is unknown. Colin points out that we know The Last of Us Part 2 cost around $220 million and briefly mentions that Spider-Man 3 is speculated to be a very expensive game at about $350 million. For context, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 had a budget of about $315 million.
Based on those numbers, Concord would indeed technically be Sony’s most expensive game to date.
“The question is why, why did this happen?” Colin said on the podcast. “This game was heavily championed behind the scenes.
Colin continues by explaining that the story is odd because the game was presented in Q1 2023 as being nowhere near done and “in a horrible position” and yet that’s when Sony decided to buy the studio.
“The idea behind this, and the term, apparently verbatim, had been used that ‘Concord is the future of PlayStation.” says Colin.
“They had such major ambition for this game that it was referred to internally as a Star Wars-like project for Sony, that it can be repeatedly revisited over and over and over again, not only in cross-media but in what we were seeing. We’ve already kinda seen little bits of it, so the weekly story vignettes they were going to release. And then, of course, the inclusion in Amazon’s Secret Levels anthology. That’s just, like, scratching the surface of it.”
“…there was a toxic positivity vibe. You weren’t allowed to say anything, apparently, internally about this game, about how, like, something is wrong with it, character designs aren’t right and so on and so forth. This was Herman Hulst’s baby, apparently, and he himself internally was a massive champion of the game.”
Colin closes the clip by commenting that Concord is Sony’s most expensive game to date, and the company’s biggest flop.
“I was saying it cost nine figures probably, like low $100 million. But I thought there’s no way it cost $200 million. Actually, it cost $400 million – and that doesn’t even include the price of acquiring the team!” exclaimed Colin.
As with any anonymous source this information must be taken with a pinch of salt, although I will say Colin Moriarty is usually good at vetting his sources and ensuring they are, at least, legit. Of course, anything they say can still be complete bollox.
But the information Colin has garnered has been backed up by someone else. Kotaku’s Ethan Gach tweeted out that “I can corroborate the part about toxic positivity. Some sources I’ve spoken with blamed a head in the sand mentality carried over from the studio’s Bungie roots.”
Gach says he’ll have more information next week.