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Sony’s Concord reportedly cost $400M to develop | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by ampersandrew@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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$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.

UPDATE: Sources not corroborating $400M number.

https://80.lv/articles/multiple-sources-dispute-concord-s-usd400-million-budget/

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[-] yesman@lemmy.world 48 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] yamanii@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

Everyone thinks they will have their own Apex, a game so good it could still carve out it's place among the established behemoths.

[-] Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago

I don't understand why they don't wait till the other ones die, like look at how successful marvel rivals beta was.

[-] MsPenguinette@lemmy.world 33 points 1 month ago

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

[-] acosmichippo@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month ago

200m is bad enough

[-] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 month ago

...on what?

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 29 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] lunarul@lemmy.world 15 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 7 points 1 month ago

Salaries and servers.

[-] Juice@midwest.social 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

[-] UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago

And then the other half of the Internet cries about how all they do are lazy remasters.

[-] danjoubu@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

That’s rough, buddy

[-] chryan@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

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.

[+] chryan@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

[deleted]

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] chryan@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Unless someone from Sony AND ProbablyMonsters confirms the real numbers, I would have nothing concrete to add to the validity of the claims, other than I think it's bullshit.

But even if I did have this bulletproof info, why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?

News like this doesn't do the industry and the people who work in it any favors other than to serve the masturbatory curiosity of people who claim "I can't believe they spent this much on a game that was clearly going to fail!"

All this kind of reporting does is continue to pull money away from investors who are willing to take chances on new teams making new games (regardless of how derivative they might seem), and cause anguish for the passionate developers who poured their lives into what they believed would have succeeded.

The games industry is in absolute shambles now thanks to years of psychopathic ravaging from large corporations with milking profits, studio shutdowns and layoffs.

Contributing to unconstructive reporting will only worsen it, and I would instead encourage you to ignore news like this.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?

Because the truth is worth knowing, and it sucks that this stuff is obfuscated the way it is compared to something like the movie industry. If true, I'd call it constructive reporting if the message becomes clear that this is an example of what's ravaging the industry; trend chasing with absurd amounts of money designed to extract some mythical amount of money from people rather than building good products on sane budgets that keep people employed. But the point is moot if you not only don't agree but also aren't in a position to refute it.

[-] chryan@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Because the truth is worth knowing

This is the defacto argument that gets pulled into reporting, good or bad.

What is the in the point in the truth in this article's reporting? What about this story told you anything, or anyone, about what's ravaging the industry? What message does a supposed $400 million cost tell you other than Concord failed? Do you think 160 developers worked on this project over 8 years with the intent to 'chase the trend'? Do you think they spent 8 years of their lives building a bad product they didn't believe in? Or was Sony and the entire leadership team able to fool all 160 people that they were building something special when all they really wanted was a trend chaser?

If this article has enlightened you in a way that has somehow eluded me, I would very much like to learn what you've gleaned.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

The average person has absolutely no idea how much it costs to make a game, so any report that comes out for any game is enlightening. When Skullgirls developers tell people that it'll cost $150k to make a single new character, and when other fighting game developers weighed in and said, "actually, that's insanely cheap," it level sets expectations for what a customer can actually expect out of a producer. The largest productions of their day during the era of the original Xbox and PS2 didn't even typically come in at $50M per game. There are a lot of reasons why it can't be exactly that anymore, but ballooning budgets are why the industry is in this spot where it's wholly unsustainable, because if you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars and you didn't make one of the most successful games in the history of the medium, it won't be making its money back.

Iterating on a trend is smart business. Iterating on a trend over the course of 6 to 8 years is not, not only because it makes the game more expensive to make and raises the floor for success, but also because the audience for that trend has likely moved on. If Concord truly cost $400M to make, it adds one more data point for people to understand how much a game can cost, and maybe, just maybe, it will make more companies focus on building a game that they know they can afford to make rather than being all or nothing on one of the riskiest projects in history. That will keep people employed rather than rapid expansion from investment into a bubble and hundreds of layoffs when the project goes south.

[-] shasta@lemm.ee 11 points 1 month ago

So much money for a game I've never heard of

[-] ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 month ago

You're telling me this cost more to develop than GTA V ?

[-] Eggyhead@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago

Sony apparently saw this as their “Star Wars moment”, and went all in. Apparently there was also a culture of “toxic positivity” inside the studio where people became too reluctant to actually criticize anything. Sony probably heard nothing but enthusiasm.

[-] Thcdenton@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Hearing this makes me want to rub my nipples

[-] yamanii@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Actual insanity, they even poured 200 more after acquiring them to fix everything.

[-] Eggyhead@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago

Imagine if even a quarter of Concord’s budget had gone to efforts on PSVR2…

[+] Jackthelad@lemmy.world -6 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 33 points 1 month ago

So funny story, people can waste a ton of money making something for way more than it should have cost.

[-] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 21 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] Katana314@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] Crashumbc@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] Jackthelad@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

8 years ago, it was just an idea. It was only in development for 4 years.

[-] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 month ago

From what I understand, it actually started concept development 10 years ago, with 8 years of active development.

[-] Noctis@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

The credits roll is like legit an hour and a half long. Id believe it.

[-] overload@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.