Just heard the story. Apparently it cost 200m by the point they presented the alpha and it was absolute crap. So Sony put another 200m into outsourcing the work asap to fix it.
I kept scrolling for this comment. Writing in assembly means you can only write for one specific instruction set. The innovation of programming languages was not just making things easier to write, it was the compiling step which could take the same code and produce machine code output for different systems, making it much easier to support multiple platforms.
As a dev that’s a skill you can develop. But it doesn’t matter when the marketing department announces a launch date before even asking developers for their estimations.