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.
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.
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.