this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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This is absolute bullshit.
Firewalk, the studio that made Concord, used to be a part of a parent startup called ProbablyMonsters. Firewalk was sold to Sony last year, in April 2023.
ProbablyMonsters only had a total Series A investment of $250 million, and Firewalk was not the only studio that it was funding - it had multiple.
But let's just say all $250mil went to Firewalk (of which is impossible because ProbablyMonsters still exists and has other studios). In order to hit this mythical $400mil figure, Sony would have had to spend $150mil in ONE YEAR.
The most significant cost of making a AAA game is paying for the developers, of which Firewalk has about 160 of them. In what world would Sony pay over 900k per developer to see Concord through to the finish line?
The more likely figure that each developer got paid on average is about 180k, that's still just short of 30mil for 1 year.
Firewalk didn't start with 160, so you can't extrapolate that cost to its 8 years of development.
Don't believe this horseshit.
They also outsourced a ton to make CG cut-scenes and such, which can rack up a bill very quickly. ProbablyMonsters was an incubator, not a parent company, as I understand it. I too am skeptical of there only being one source in Colin Moriarty, but I trust Jordan Middler to vet the story, even if he isn't corroborating it, and as others have mentioned, the credits are literally over an hour long, which is evidence that supports the high costs.
If you were in such a role that you could correct anything in the story, I'd encourage you to reach out to a journalist and do so.
Unless someone from Sony AND ProbablyMonsters confirms the real numbers, I would have nothing concrete to add to the validity of the claims, other than I think it's bullshit.
But even if I did have this bulletproof info, why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?
News like this doesn't do the industry and the people who work in it any favors other than to serve the masturbatory curiosity of people who claim "I can't believe they spent this much on a game that was clearly going to fail!"
All this kind of reporting does is continue to pull money away from investors who are willing to take chances on new teams making new games (regardless of how derivative they might seem), and cause anguish for the passionate developers who poured their lives into what they believed would have succeeded.
The games industry is in absolute shambles now thanks to years of psychopathic ravaging from large corporations with milking profits, studio shutdowns and layoffs.
Contributing to unconstructive reporting will only worsen it, and I would instead encourage you to ignore news like this.
Because the truth is worth knowing, and it sucks that this stuff is obfuscated the way it is compared to something like the movie industry. If true, I'd call it constructive reporting if the message becomes clear that this is an example of what's ravaging the industry; trend chasing with absurd amounts of money designed to extract some mythical amount of money from people rather than building good products on sane budgets that keep people employed. But the point is moot if you not only don't agree but also aren't in a position to refute it.
This is the defacto argument that gets pulled into reporting, good or bad.
What is the in the point in the truth in this article's reporting? What about this story told you anything, or anyone, about what's ravaging the industry? What message does a supposed $400 million cost tell you other than Concord failed? Do you think 160 developers worked on this project over 8 years with the intent to 'chase the trend'? Do you think they spent 8 years of their lives building a bad product they didn't believe in? Or was Sony and the entire leadership team able to fool all 160 people that they were building something special when all they really wanted was a trend chaser?
If this article has enlightened you in a way that has somehow eluded me, I would very much like to learn what you've gleaned.
The average person has absolutely no idea how much it costs to make a game, so any report that comes out for any game is enlightening. When Skullgirls developers tell people that it'll cost $150k to make a single new character, and when other fighting game developers weighed in and said, "actually, that's insanely cheap," it level sets expectations for what a customer can actually expect out of a producer. The largest productions of their day during the era of the original Xbox and PS2 didn't even typically come in at $50M per game. There are a lot of reasons why it can't be exactly that anymore, but ballooning budgets are why the industry is in this spot where it's wholly unsustainable, because if you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars and you didn't make one of the most successful games in the history of the medium, it won't be making its money back.
Iterating on a trend is smart business. Iterating on a trend over the course of 6 to 8 years is not, not only because it makes the game more expensive to make and raises the floor for success, but also because the audience for that trend has likely moved on. If Concord truly cost $400M to make, it adds one more data point for people to understand how much a game can cost, and maybe, just maybe, it will make more companies focus on building a game that they know they can afford to make rather than being all or nothing on one of the riskiest projects in history. That will keep people employed rather than rapid expansion from investment into a bubble and hundreds of layoffs when the project goes south.
I don't think I have anything new to add to answer your questions that I haven't already said, so I think we can agree to disagree.