Concord was a disaster for PlayStation, I think we can all agree. It was met with apathy and a surprisingly small number of players upon release, and just a week later PlayStation pulled the plug on it and refunded everyone who bought it.
Now, with the game’s director reportedly stepping down and the studio in a “shaky position”, new information has emerged that further undermines Concorde’s standing.
The news comes after Sacred Symbols’ Colin Moriarty posted a nine-minute clip from the latest episode of Sacred Symbols on his X account. Moriarty previously worked as a reporter for IGN and has written many articles there, but these days, it’s common for them not to post articles unless someone actively provides the information.
According to Colin, someone working at Concord contacted him and shared inside information. Colin claims to have verified who he was, what his position was, and talked to him extensively. At the end of the clip, he describes the source as “completely credible,” so he feels confident in presenting the information he was given.
“The reason I wanted to tell this story is because some of the assumptions I made about games were completely wrong – about how much they cost and how much Sony actually lost,” Colin said.
“So the really important thing to know here,” Colin said on the latest episode of Sacred Symbols, “is that it cost about $400 million to build the Concorde.”
At the end of the clip, Colin confirms that this huge sum does not include the actual cost of purchasing the studio.
“Concord was basically in alpha by Q1 2023. This was before Sony even acquired the team, but Sony had been working with Firewalk’s original owners, ProbablyMonsters, and Firewalk had been working on Concord since probably late 2020, early 2021 at the latest,” Colin explains, before saying that around $200 million has been spent on the game to this point.
“It’s unclear how much of that money came from ProbablyMonsters and the original investors, and how much came from Sony,” Colin said.
But Colin’s sources say Sony spent another $200 million on the game between Q1 and launch, bringing the total to a whopping $400 million.
“The backstory about Concorde is that it was in ridiculous shape when it was released,” Colin said.
“The game was so bad that Sony figured they had to spend another $200 million on it, $200 million more to get it to MVP status, to great status, to just viable status.”
The MVP state that Colin mentioned stands for Minimum Viable Product, a term used in business to describe the minimum that developers have achieved to the point where it’s acceptable to sell the product.
Colin says a significant portion of the additional $200 million came from having to outsource work to other studios to finish the game, including two aspects of the game that simply weren’t worked on before it was marked as alpha: onboarding and monetization.
Colin says that, from what he knows, he thinks Concord is Sony’s most expensive game to date. Of course, that’s based purely on a $400 million development budget, with Sony’s share unknown. Colin says he knows that The Last of Us Part 2 cost around $220 million to make, and he briefly mentions that Spider-Man 3 is estimated to cost around $350 million, making it a very expensive game. For reference, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 cost around $315 million to make.
Based on these figures, Concord will actually be the most expensive game Sony has ever released.
“The question is, why did this happen? Why did this happen?” Colin said on the podcast. “The game was heavily defended behind the scenes.
Colin explained that the story was odd because the game was announced in Q1 2023 as being far from finished and in a “terrible state”, but that was precisely when Sony decided to acquire the studio.
“The idea and the term was used literally, ‘Concorde is the future of PlayStation,'” Colin said.
“They have such huge ambitions for this game that internally at Sony it’s been called a Star Wars-like project, and we’ve been able to see it over and over again, not just across media, but also in what we’ve been seeing. We’ve already seen bits and pieces of it, there have been weekly story vignettes that they’re going to release. And of course, it’s going to be included in the Secret Level anthology on Amazon. That’s just scratching the surface.”
“… there was this toxic positivity. I don’t think we could say anything internally about the game. That something was wrong, that the character designs weren’t right, or anything like that. This was Herman Hulst’s baby, and he was a huge champion of the game internally.”
Colin ends the video by saying that Concorde is the most expensive game Sony has ever released, and the company’s biggest flop.
“I said it was probably in the nine figures, $100 million. But I didn’t think it was $200 million. It was actually $400 million. And that doesn’t even include the cost of acquiring the team!” Colin exclaimed.
As with any anonymous source, this information should be taken with a grain of salt, but Colin Moriarty will tell you that he is usually good at researching his sources and at least making sure they are legitimate. Of course, what they say could still be complete bullshit.
But Colin’s information was corroborated by someone else. Kotaku’s Ethan Gach tweeted, “I can confirm the toxic positivity part, with some sources I’ve spoken to accusing the studio of a head-in-the-sand mentality inherited from its Bungie roots.”
Worth said more information would be available next week.
