For these gaas games you can never predict what hits. One day there is nothing, next day some 1 dude game on steam comes out and every kid plays it
Apparently Concord Cost Sony 400 million and was internally championed as future of playstation
- Thread starter quest4441
- Start date
Colin has been talking nonsense since the Bungie takeover and Concord was his number one "hate game" that he has been attacking since the first gameplay.
Of course he has countless reasons for saying such things:
1. Attention and advertising for his site
2. Nobody can refute it, except serious journalists like Schreier or Sony itself
3. He often has completely absurd theories which he discusses with his friend David Jaffe.
Anyone can just do the math on how much Concord would have cost. 150 full-time employees at Firewall, an unrealistic monthly salary of $10,000 was $18 million annually. Even if full production had taken 10 years, that would only be $180 million. Even if fixed studio costs of $1 million annually were added on, it wouldn't be $200 million in 10 years.
Firewalk started 8 years ago with 12 employees and Concord was never in development for 8 years, let alone 10 years. My estimated 200 million is realistically much too high. And all the other employees in the credits, such as QA, translators, speakers, marketing, SIE employees were not paid for the full development of Concord, or it was not the only project. Realistically, costs are 150-200 million, which still would be a lot.
It is of course possible that the 400 million was the planned budget, i.e. 200 for development and 200 for supporting the game in the next few years. For Helldivers 2, a budget was also planned that included development and support, so that Arrowhead knows how many staff they can employ and for how long.
That would be the only logical explanation for how 400 million came about, but that is not the development costs, or because Sony has "paused" everything related to Concord, the rest of the budget is frozen for now and cannot be included in the calculation. Colin should really know something like that. Either he deliberately keeps it quiet in the podcast, which, as I said, I don't know, or only in the excerpt that goes viral.
For context: With development costs of over 500 million dollars, RDR2 is one of the most expensive games that has taken longer to develop and has more than three times as many employees. HZD had a budget of just under 200 million in 2017, including marketing. Guerilla was twice as big back then, and HZD was also in development for over 6 years. Naughty Dog is even bigger, and even LoU 2 ended up being cheaper than the 400 million that Colin says.
In my opinion, the sum can't be right. As a reminder: Hulst took the LoU 1 remake from a sub-studio and gave it to Naughty Dog because it would have been too expensive there. I find it hard to imagine that the same Hulst would release 400 million for a run-of-the-mill hero shooter and see it through to launch, despite disastrous beta numbers. You obviously also don't understand that there aren't two CEOs because they don't trust Hulst, but rather that Hulst has a completely different area of responsibility than Nishino. One takes care of games, the other takes care of the platform.
Exactly, GaaS is pretty much this. No company should invest more than $20 million on a GaaS. Make 2 maps with character editor and release that shit as early access then watch what happens.
