Apparently Concord Cost Sony 400 million and was internally championed as future of playstation

Muddasar

Veteran
22 Jun 2022
2,402
2,993
People are willing to believe anything if they WANT to believe it. It's literally how fake news spreads so easily.

This nonsense figure will spread like wildfire and eventually become the de facto official cost for Concord until some other idiot puts out another figure for views.

Repeat a lie enough and it becomes the truth.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Men_in_Boxes

Yurinka

Veteran
VIP
21 Jun 2022
7,296
6,199
For people that don’t believe the $400 million dev cost: Didn’t we recently have a reports that Firewalk is among the priciest per head cost among all PS studios?

Wouldn’t it make sense then that the dev cost would be high in this case?
No. As I remember Firewalk has around 165 people or something like that. Which is pretty small compared to Bungie, Insomniac, ND, Guerrilla or PD, who published games whose team (the one from their studio, not counting the people from the other studios) were around that size.

So even if their average salary was higher than the rest (something I doubt since Sony has super successful studios like Bungie, ND or SSM also in very expensive places) the numbers don't make sense.

Regarding the support teams: in AAA games the lead dev team is only around 10% of the total amount of people who works in the game. The rest are from internal or external stupport teams, plus people from the publisher/HQ (like marketing, PR, QA, localization, legal, executives, etc). You can double check it in the credits of most games.

This game only had 16 characters with a very limited amount of animations, weapons and a few stages. The amount of art and animation -which is what most support teams do- of this game was very small compared to any Sony open world game. So it's very hard to believe that they needed a lot of stuff from support teams when many of them in the studio are very experienced devs in "similar" games like Destiny, Halo, CoD etc.

It has been developed during a fair amount of years, but several of them being a small team. So I don't see where the $400M could have gone. Somewhere between $100 and $200M, pretty likely close to $200M, makes more sense.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Muddasar

Killer_Sakoman

Veteran
21 Jun 2022
1,945
1,855
By the way Herman wasn't part of any of the latest PS5 pro announcements. The other Japanese guy seems like he starting to show himself as the one and only CEO.
 

Bryank75

I don't get ulcers, I give 'em!
Founder
18 Jun 2022
8,755
15,386
icon-era.com
Whether it was 100 or 400 million, it was too much for what was produced and I really wonder if there is something more going on underneath....

Can a manager not see that the investment isn't worth what they are doing before half way in the production cycle?

Who was being paid these vast quantities of money?

I really think Sony needs an eastward shift.

Korea, Japan, China... No nonsense game development.
 

BLAZE

Active member
20 Feb 2024
205
179
People believe any lie, a few days ago they put the budget for this game at 300 million, now 400 million? Whoever invented this knows that it can never be disproved or proven, so they invent anything
 
  • Like
Reactions: Entropi

Killer_Sakoman

Veteran
21 Jun 2022
1,945
1,855
We won't see the number till the next successful hack 😆
But regardless, all the rumors suggests a huge number. And we know it is not less than 100 millions.
 

Danja

Veteran
Icon Extra
10 Mar 2023
5,453
5,085
Okay lets assume 6 years of development-

They start of with at least 80-100 employees in 2018, Probably Monsters raised 265 million to fund the 3 studios under them.
We can assume a burn rate of 25 million/yr for employee salaries for both full time and external contractors for each studio they have as they started having financial problems by 2022 and shuttered one studio

Add in the overheads of real estate, expensive facilities management etc for 10-15 million a year. This is bellevue, washington after all

With bonuses and increments so far we are hitting around 120 million in total costs come 2022 for firewalk, Now Probably monsters starts facing financial troubles so Sony comes in and bails them out.

The dev team increases to 150-170 + increasing contractors brings the burn rate to 40-50 million.

This comes out to around 200-250 million come 2024, Now I think the rush job hiring contractors to finish the game must have cost a premium so add in those costs as well, Add in the marketing costs (streamers, tv show, controllers etc etc). The expensive cinematics add in another 50 million if they stockpiled for at least an year

I bet the whole thing cost anywhere between 300-400 million, even if its 300 that is a disastrous number.

And as stated by the players who liked the game - the game seems to have top notch quality, polish and looks expensive so it is reasonable to expect it to be expensive to make.
They had less than 20 devs working on the game in 2018
 
OP
OP
quest4441

quest4441

Veteran
27 Feb 2024
1,696
1,952
They had less than 20 devs working on the game in 2018
that was in 2016 I believe where they started with an idea on a napkin, the studio proper started functioning in 2018 but then again I am not stating that the 400 million number is 100% correct, I believe its more in the range of 250-300 million. I just described a plausible ball park scenario which could result in the 400 million cost.
 

Danja

Veteran
Icon Extra
10 Mar 2023
5,453
5,085
that was in 2016 I believe where they started with an idea on a napkin, the studio proper started functioning in 2018 but then again I am not stating that the 400 million number is 100% correct, I believe its more in the range of 250-300 million. I just described a plausible ball park scenario which could result in the 400 million cost.
They did not have 20 devs working on the game in 2018 though? I dunno why you guys are so insistent about spreading lies about this game and the Studio?

They didn't even have 20 devs in early 2019 either. They were still working outta an attic then too.

Probably Monsters had a little less than 200 developers spread across 3 studios in 2021... There's just no way anything of what you are hypothetically assuming adds up man.

I get y'all wanna dance on the grave but nothing about this makes sense
 
  • haha
Reactions: Infinity

Entropi

Veteran
Icon Extra
22 Jan 2023
3,101
4,332
I wonder how many third-party exclusive deals had to die so Sony could pay for Concord to see the light of day.