It sounds like someone smoked too much, if that phrase was actually used in reference to the game’s short-lived failure…

Concord was one of the worst debacles in the history of the gaming industry, as the hero shooter with a live service model was taken offline two weeks after its release, earning a user rating of just 1.8 on a scale of 1-10 on Metacritic. Speaking about the game on the Sacred Symbols podcast, Colin Moriarty said that he had a long chat with a member of the Firewak Studios team that developed Concord and learned a lot from the conversation.

The game was doomed from the start because it was hyped internally and seen as the future of PlayStation. This may make sense in the sense that the demise of Concord is a sketch of the demise of PlayStation. There was a “toxic positivity” within the studio, so it was forbidden to give negative feedback on a game that had been made with a ridiculous amount of money: around $400 million (!!!) had been spent on its development! Concord was in alpha at the end of 2023, and Sony didn’t even own Firewalk at that time.

I spoke extensively with someone who worked on Concord, and it’s so much worse than you think.

It was internally referred to as “The Future of PlayStation” with Star Wars-like potential, and a dev culture of “toxic positivity” halted any negative feedback.

Making it cost $400m. pic.twitter.com/F5O0oy4gaQ

— Colin Moriarty (@longislandviper) September 20, 2024

Even before reaching alpha status, at least $200 million had been spent on Concord’s development. Moriarty is not sure how much of the money came from the original studio and how much of the budget came from Sony. Between alpha and release, the cost doubled (another $200 million was kicked in by Sony), and by the time the public saw the game, it was in a “ridiculous state” and looked so bad that Sony felt it needed to spend even more money to make the product worthwhile. By the end of March 2023, Concord was still unfinished, and that’s when Sony began outsourcing development work to other studios, along with more money to finally get it all together.

By the time Concord was released, Sony had made about $1 million in revenue, but that was eventually paid back to everyone. That’s Sony’s biggest loss in the market, and for example, The Last of Us Part 2 and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 were cheaper, but still much bigger hits. Concord was treated by Sony as a Star Wars-type project, and they believed it would be a huge success. It was the love child of PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst.

…we don’t need to add anything to that.

Source: WCCFTech