$200M before the Sony acquisition and $200M after. It’s a little hard to believe. The story seems to only be coming from Colin Moriarty right now, but I trust Jordan Middler to consider it at least reasonably plausible if he wrote it up for VGC.
UPDATE: Sources not corroborating $400M number.
https://80.lv/articles/multiple-sources-dispute-concord-s-usd400-million-budget/
It didn’t cost 400 million. There’s no way a game like this can cost more than something like The Last of Us 2.
So funny story, people can waste a ton of money making something for way more than it should have cost.
8 years of development under multiple publishers will bleed a lot of money. They also hired on a lot of “experienced devs” from different game studios to head the different departments, and presumably paid them well enough to get them to leave their original companies.
This is probably the biggest lesson against the gamer mindset of “Give the developers time to work, and they’ll polish it to a shine.” Sometimes, even time doesn’t improve the end product if the idea wasn’t great. It might even indicate that on some instances where publishers scrapped a ‘cool’ project that was in the works, it was actually the right call. It might have been a Concord waiting to happen.
Absolutely, and especially at a Corp as big as Sony, you have a lot of office politics in play also. Folks pushing personal agendas because it advanced their career.
Yeah, but we have seen a lot of examples where it was clearly a lack of time. An example would be the Gollum game. It had some very good concepts(making decisions between both of his personalities), but it didnt had any impact. This seems like something where if they had more time they could have formed this into a very good game mechanic.
8 years ago, it was just an idea. It was only in development for 4 years.
From what I understand, it actually started concept development 10 years ago, with 8 years of active development.
The credits roll is like legit an hour and a half long. Id believe it.
Yeah it seems like the source is a podcast saying a number like after talking with a staff member of concord. I would have thought that people below executive/finance suite wouldn’t have that information. Not sure if they talked to someone in there but $400 million is just a bit steep.
Not impossible with tech salaries being what they are though, maybe it includes the buyout of the entire studio by Sony in that number though.
Colin said in the clip that it doesn’t include the cost of the buyout.
Hush, the accountants promised they’d fall for it!