Concord the Aftermath
Concord was so much worse than we thought. The claims that it cost $200 million appear to have been just a rumor.
Try $400 million.
Sony is starting to leak largely because people are starting to get the ax because Sony has to cut corners now.
Sony’s PlayStation CEO Herman Hulst was a relentless champion of Concord. So far as he was concerned it was going to be Sony’s biggest franchise. He was convinced it would be a (pre-Disney) Star Wars level hit. To include broad cross-media distribution. Meaning movies, TV, and books. Since Sony is at its core a Japanese company, it was vulnerable to Toxic Positivity. No one was permitted to breathe a word about all of the obvious problems Concord had.
Concord was viewed as “the future of the PlayStation’s brand’s entire operations.”
And it had nothing but problems. In Q1 of 2023, Concord was in a barely playable and very unstable Alpha state. And it had already cost $200 million to get it that far. This should have been the point where the story ended. Namely bankruptcy for Firewalk Studios. Sony bought up Firewalk.
“A major expense was to urgently outsource much of the game to other studios to finish building the game out,” he shared. “And that two fundamental games were not worked on at all up to the point in which the game was shown in Alpha: onboarding, nothing about that. There was nothing about how players make their character all that kind of stuff or choose their character and get there. And monetization. Two very expensive, very specific, and boutique things that happen to games like this.”
Through, the power of Toxic Positivity and another $200 million, it was crunched into MVP (Minimum Viable Play) state. What it couldn’t be turned into was something gamers wanted to play, let alone pay AAA prices for.
I have no idea what the financing for this thing looks like but Sony had to have taken a bath over it.
Killing it as abruptly as Sony did sounds like orders from Tokyo. I expect some very senior people to get a “window seat job” out of this. Meaning a job where whose sole duty is to sit at a desk for eight hours a day staring out a window.
The Woke toll in gaming has been great and it isn’t over yet. Too many projects to far down the line to be stopped now because they won’t sell.
There’s a reason this is the Golden Age of Indie Games.
