LogInBut some agree that "toxic positivity" was to blame for at least part of its failure.
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Concord had only 2 weeks to enjoy its freedom before it ultimately died and wasted Sony lots of millions. How much? At first, the development costs were estimated between $50-200 million, but a couple of days ago, Colin Moriarty, the owner of the Last Stand collection of gaming podcasts, shared that it was actually much more expensive.
Moriarty was contacted by a person who worked on Concord, and they said it cost about $400 million to make, which is a crazy sum of money, I don't have to tell you that. It's especially tragic, considering how fast the game went down.
However, not everyone believes this number. Kotaku's Ethan Gach couldn't confirm the budget, "but $400 million is not the number I've heard," he said. The head of GamesIndustry.biz, Christopher Dring, also doesn't think it's true because "no game has that dev budget."
"Concord didn’t even get any above-the-line marketing spend," he claimed, adding, "There’s just no way a game with half the dev team as Spider-Man 2 has a budget that big."
The Verge's Tom Warren joined the skepticism: "I'm amazed but also not amazed that publications have run with this number. You only have to look at ProbablyMonsters's funding to know it's nonsense."
It's, of course, your business whom to believe, but Moriarty said he had checked his source's background and found everything fine. Then again, it's just one person, so we should probably wait for someone else to come with receipts.
Money was not the only problem in the game's production. According to Moriarty, a "dev culture of 'toxic positivity' halted any negative feedback," no one could say anything bad about it, which was confirmed by Ethan Gach.
"Some sources I've spoken with blamed a head in the sand mentality carried over from the studio's Bungie roots," he said. "A sense the game would come together because the team was too good to fail."
Concord was supposed to be "the future of PlayStation," called a "Star Wars-like project" internally, that's how important it reportedly was. But the game was actually (CEO of Sony Interactive) "Hermen Hulst's baby."
Whatever the case with the atmosphere, Concord is not alive to tell the tale, but hopefully, we will hear more from the people who worked on it.
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