Concord went offline earlier this month just two weeks after it came out, with Sony deciding to refund everyone who purchased copies of the game (which wasn’t too many people, according to estimates), in what is surely one of the biggest, most high-profile failures we’ve ever seen for PlayStation’s first-party portfolio. Now, more information on the doomed project has seemingly emerged, shedding light on the astronomical budget the game was developed on.
As per Last Stand Media founder Colin Moriarty, Concord had a budget of about $400 million, with “most” of it being spent by Sony, making it the biggest ever first-party PlayStation release in terms of budget. In comparison, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 had a budget of $315 million, while The Last of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West both had $200 million budgets each. Moriarty claimed on a recent episode of the Sacred Symbols podcast that he was told about the same by a developer who worked on the game.
Allegedly, by the time Concord entered the alpha stage of development, which was in early 2023, about $200 million had already been spent on the game. The game was, however, in “a laughable shape” at this point (around the time it was announced in May last year), with work not having been done on major elements of the game like onboarding and monetization.
Significant work also had to be outsourced to external studios. To get the game to an acceptable level of quality, Sony decided to spend another $200 million on it at this point. Moriarty goes on to claim that the total figure of $400 million also does not include the money that it cost for Sony to acquire Concord developer Firewalk Studios, which happened in April last year.
As per Moriarty, Concord’s development was plagued with issues of “toxic positivity”, which meant negative feedback on the game was ignored, with PlayStation higher-ups – specifically, current co-CEO of PlayStation, Hermen Hulst – believing the game had the potential to be a massive success for the company, maybe even on the level of something like Star Wars. Allegedly, the game was internally referred to as “the future of PlayStation”.
Prior to Concord being shut down, reports claimed that the game had managed to sell just 25,000 units upon release. Since the game was pulled offline, Sony has made no announcement regarding its future, or the future of Firewalk.
As per a recent report, Concord’s director, Ryan Ellis, has stepped down from his role following the game’s shuttering. Read more on that through here.