No matter what Sony does to Concord, there’s very little chance it will recoup whatever was spent developing the game. According to some reports, Sony spent $400 million on the failed shooter. Insiders close to the project claim that PlayStation was so arrogant regarding the brand’s popularity that it believed Concord was “too good to fail”.
However, at the moment the so-called “$400 million budget” is still a touchy subject. While reports claim PlayStation threw $400 million at the game’s development, some journalists in the industry have argued that the budget isn’t correct. $400 million is a lot and sounds a bit farfetched. If you take Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, that game costs Sony $315 million to develop.
Regardless, Concord still cost a few pennies to make and Sony banked on its success even in an oversaturated live-service PvP shooter industry. One source says that Sony looked at Concord as the next Star Wars series. It believed the game’s characters would get their own story arcs and there were plans to flesh out the story and universe as the game grew.
PlayStation reportedly viewed Concord as the future of the brand with internal staff boasting how it would change the industry and be revisited over and over again.
Concord was in development for eight years and hundreds of people worked on the game. So many people worked on the game that its credits took over an hour to go through all the names of staff members and people involved in the project.
Concord was shut down just a week after its launch last month. Sony announced that the shooter would be removed from the PlayStation Network and refunds were issued. The servers were then taken offline on 6 September as player numbers dwindled into the single-digit spectrum.
Since its closure, Concord developer Firewalk Studios has reportedly been in limbo as it awaits plans from PlayStation. The game’s director has left the studio amid all the drama. At the moment it isn’t clear what Sony wants to do with Concord. However, in the meantime the game’s director has left the studio and staff morale is at an all-time low.
Source: X
