Concord was ‘too good to fail’ as sources claim $400,000,000 budget

Sony considered PS5 flop Concord ‘The future of PlayStation’, according to insiders who suggest a culture of ‘toxic positivity’ killed the game.

It’s no secret what happened to PlayStation 5 exclusive Concord, with the game being shut down less than two weeks after it launched, but the truth of what was happening behind the scenes, and how the game got into the position it did, may never be known for certain.

Last week there were rumours that the director had stepped down, and that the game would never return, but that’s not confirmed and neither is the suggestion that the game had an overall budget of $400 million (£300 million).

That seems unlikely (the most expensive movie ever made is Star Wars: The Force Awakens on $447 million), and there’s already disagreement amongst various insiders as to whether it’s true, but there’s also agreement that the game’s biggest problem was what’s being described as an attitude of ‘toxicity positivity’ amongst the developers and Sony managers.

The allegations began with podcaster Colin Moriarty, who claimed that Concord was referred to by Sony as ‘The Future of PlayStation’, with ‘Star Wars-like potential’ and a developer culture of ‘toxicity positivity.’

By that he means that the developer and Sony were so convinced that the game was going to be a massive hit that negative feedback was ignored, along with dissenting voices.

This was quickly backed up by Ethan Gach, senior reporter at Kotaku, who described a ‘head in the sand mentality carried over from the studio’s Bungie roots. A sense the game would come together because the team was too good to fail.’

Concord was developed by Firewalk Studios over a period of almost eight years – at the beginning of which Overwatch, which Concord closely resembles, was at the peak of its popularity.

Firewalk is staffed by a number of ex-Bungie developers, including director Ryan Ellis – who was previously creative director on Destiny 2.

Moriarty also suggests that Concord cost $400 million to make, which on the face of it seems very unlikely, given the game does not seem like it would cost that much, there was little marketing, and the highest confirmed budget (in the sense that it was leaked by a hack of developer Insomniac’s servers) is around $300 million for Spider-Man 2.

Gach has stated that $400 million is ‘not the number I’ve heard.’ Others have been less diplomatic with their rebuttal, with GamesIndustry.biz‘s Chris Dring insisting that, ’no game has that dev budget.’

In the same Twitter thread, The Verge senior editor Tom Warren agreed with Dring and insisted that, ‘You only have to look at ProbablyMonsters’s funding to know it’s nonsense.’

This is a reference to Moriarty’s claims, in his podcast, that around $200 million had already been spent on Concord, by previous owner ProbablyMonsters, before Sony acquired Firewalk. Supposedly, Sony then spent the same again on finishing the game, incurring considerable outsourcing costs.

Even $200 million is at the extreme of video game budgets, especially as Moriarty is not claiming the $400 million figure includes the, unspecified, price it cost Sony to buy Firewalk.

However, whether the $400 million figure is accurate or not doesn’t affect the other claims and clearly something at Sony and Firewalk went very wrong during Concord’s development.

Whether we’ll ever learn exactly what remains to be seen, but it almost certainly won’t be from Sony or Firework themselves.