Sources claim Concord ended up costing Sony around $400 million

The situation surrounding Sony's recently released, and quickly delisted game, Concord, continues to get more confusing. As it turns out, there really was a huge amount of positivity around the project internally at Sony, despite the total lack of public interest from fans. On top of that, it has been claimed that Sony spent around $400 million on the project, which would make Concord the biggest flop in gaming history. 

According to long-time PlayStation-focused podcaster and former IGN alumni, Colin Moriarty, a source with knowledge of the situation has said that Concord was billed internally as “the future of PlayStation”, with ambitions to be as big as a franchise like Star Wars. Internally at Firewalk Studios, negative feedback was apparently discouraged, fostering an environment of ‘toxic positivity'.

I spoke extensively with someone who worked on Concord, and it's so much worse than you think.

It was internally referred to as “The Future of PlayStation” with Star Wars-like potential, and a dev culture of “toxic positivity” halted any negative feedback.

Making it cost $400m. pic.twitter.com/F5O0oy4gaQ

— Colin Moriarty (@longislandviper) September 20, 2024

It is also claimed that the game ended up costing as much as $400 million to create, but that figure has been disputed. While it is often claimed that Concord had an eight-year development timeline, Firewalk Studios was only founded six years ago and for most of that period of time, it had a small team of a dozen or so employees, before ramping up after securing additional investment and ultimately being acquired by Sony. Even at its biggest, Firewalk was a small studio, with less than 150 developers. It seems doubtful that Firewalk was dropping over $60 million per year into this project over six years, and it makes even less sense that Sony would spend hundreds of millions on it in the few years after it acquired the company.

Despite high hopes from the team behind Concord and positive feedback around the gameplay, the game was held back somewhat by its characters, which were on the generic Disney-Marvel Sci-Fi side. As a result, very few players gave the game a chance, even during its feely available open beta, which peaked at just 2000 players on Steam in the month ahead of release.

Ultimately, Concord sold so few copies that Sony decided to take the game offline. Analysts estimated that fewer than 25,000 copies were sold, which would have equated to around $1 million in revenue, far less than Sony needs to recoup development costs. The director behind the game Ryan Ellis, then stepped down from his role to take on a supporting role. It is currently unclear if Sony will re-launch Concord in the future.

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KitGuru Says: A few things are clear from this scenario. Sony needs to stop its programme in which Bungie goes around all the live-service projects and evaluates them, so far all this has achieved is the cancellation of projects fans were actually excited about, like TLOU Factions. Secondly, if Concord is to return, it needs a total visual revamp with all-new character art and a better marketing plan behind it. Despite being shown in multiple State of Play streams, very few people were even aware that Concord was coming out, or that the beta was happening. Thanks to this failed launch, the game will no doubt have a few more eyes on it when it does resurface. 

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