Concord allegedly cost Sony $400M and was meant to be PlayStation’s Star Wars
Firewalk StudiosAccording to Colin Moriarty, an industry veteran who claims to have talked with a developer at Firewalk, Concord cost a total of $400 million dollars and was meant to be the “future of PlayStation,” with a level of impact similar to Star Wars.
Concord was taken offline after less than two weeks and has gone down as one of the biggest flops in gaming history, with the game losing untold millions as all players who bought it were refunded. Untold until now, at least.
Colin Moriarty claims the game cost a total of $400 million to make, with $200 million of that amounting to development costs before PlayStation bought out Firewalk Studios and another $200 million spent by Sony after.
He claimed he had a long conversation with someone who worked on the game and was given a ton of information about its troubled development.
“Concord cost about 400 million dollars to make,” Moriarty claimed. “In the first quarter of 2023, Concord entered into Alpha state. This was before Sony purchased the team.”
Even to get it into Alpha, $200 million was spent on the game according to his source.
“The game was in laughable shape when it was shown, when the Alpha was ready to go,” he continued. “It was in such horrible shape that Sony felt like they needed to spend that much money again, $200M plus $200M, to get the game to [viability].”
Despite its beleaguered production cycle and, according to Moriarty, a large portion of the game being outsourced to other studios to get it rushed out the door, sentiment about the project internally suffered from “toxic positivity.”
“Concord was ‘The Future of PlayStation’, that they had such major ambition for this game that it was referred to as a Star Wars-like project for Sony, that it could be repeatedly revisited over and over again.”
As of now, Concord’s future is in limbo, with the game’s servers taken down and all copies of the game refunded. It is currently impossible to play it.
Update 23/09/2024: The figure of $400 million has been disputed by other sources. Gamesindustry.biz journalist Chris Dring, stated on X that “no game has that dev budget.” The Verge’s Tom Warren‘s also pointed out in the thread, “You only have to look at ProbablyMonsters’s funding to know it’s nonsense.”
ProbablyMonsters is the parent company of Firewalk Studios. In 2022, Gamesindustry.biz reported that the company had raised $250 million in funding, but that this would be to split between its three studios Firewalk, Cauldron, and a then unannounced studio. (The company has since announced Battle Barge and Hidden Grove as subsidiaries.).