Concord was reportedly in development for eight years, at a cost of an estimated $100m+
$100M is probably less than one year of salaries of a 160 person studio in Bellevue.
This isn't a studio located in Poland or Croatia where senior software devs get less than $70k, it's in one of USA's most expensive cities.
and people don't even understand acquisition versus development costs.
Do explain the difference between investment into a game and investment into a studio that only ever worked into one unreleased game.
What other assets - non attributable to that same game - does that studio have, that provide value to the acquisition?
Office space? No, all these companies work on rentals. Render servers? Perhaps, assuming the render isn't done through a cloud service which is what is more often used, especially in a startup. Lifetime software licenses are also a thing of the past, as everything works through annual licenses now so those aren't assets either.
People's workstations? Ok, assume $8k worth of workstation hardware per each of the 160 employees and you get short of $1.3M and these are amortizations so Sony wouldn't even pay the full cost of that during the acquisition. Let's be generous and assume $1M for this.
Do you think Firewalk developed a super elaborate backend online match+play system that Sony was going to use throughout their other product stacks? If so then Sony is really stupid because 2 years ago they paid no less than $3.7B for Bungie. More likely, they got Bungie's backend and adapted it to work on Concord.
MoCap was definitely a contract as well. Not even big studios have their own mocap studio rooms, let alone a startup.
So, what exactly is adding to the startup's acquisition value, other than the assets they developed for Concord and $1M for workstation hardware?
www.theguardian.com
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