Earlier this month, Sony announced that Firewalk Studios' hero shooter Concord would be shut down —less than two weeks after it had launched on PlayStation 5 and PC. The game had struggled to attract any sort of audience at all, but it was still a surprise to see how quickly Sony pulled the plug.
The game had been deemed a colossal failure and one of Sony's worst financial losses of all time. Exactly how much Sony had lost on the project was a mystery until this week when a report from Colin Moriarty, founder of the PlayStation podcast Sacred Symbols, shed light on just how much it cost to developer Concord.
Moriarty spoke extensively with a dev who purportedly worked on Concord and on his latest podcast shared some of the jaw-dropping financial figures involved with the game's development. The most shocking reveal: Concord cost about $400 million to make (not including what it cost Sony to purchase the developer).
Moriarty went through the timeline of Concord's development, explaining that the game had basically entered into an alpha state in the first quarter of 2023.
"This was before Sony had even purchased the team, but Sony had been working with Probably Monsters, which was the original owner of Firewalk [Studios] and Firewalk probably since late 2020, maybe 2021 at the latest on Concord," he explained. "The game was in development before that, up to the point that when the game went into Alpha state, they had already spent about $200 million on it.”
He notes that it's unclear how much of that money is from Probably Monsters and the original investors in the game and how much of it was from Sony. But it gets worse. He explains that from that point in Q1 2023 to the point until the game launched, Sony spent an additional $200 million on it.
"The scuttlebutt behind the scenes about Concord is that the game was in a laughable shape when it was shown," he revealed, adding: “And when the Alpha was ready to go, and they were like, ‘We’re ready to get moving towards getting this thing out in the next year or two’, it was in such horrible shape that Sony felt they needed to spend that much money again – you know, $200 million plus $200 million – to get the game to the [minimum viable product] status. Not to the status of it being a great game, to get it to just viability.”
The former IGN reporter went on to reveal that a major expense was having to outsource much of the game to other studios to finish building it. Fundamental things, like onboarding and monetization, were reportedly not at all worked on up until the point the game was shown in alpha.
"This is the biggest game Sony has ever released from a budgetary standpoint from the first party or the second party," Moriarty then summarized. "And they lost all of it because they made no money. They made about a million dollars gross revenue and then they gave it all back. So this was a huge, multiple hundred of million dollar loss.”
Sony apparently had high hopes for Concord and ambitious plans for the game, apparently even referring to it as "the future of PlayStation." It was being described internally as "a 'Star Wars-like project for Sony,' in that it can repeatedly be revisited over and over and over again," he noted.
Alas, that vision of Concord will remain just a pipe dream. The servers for the online shooter were taken offline on September 6, 2024, with full refunds issued to anyone who purchased the game. It's unclear what Sony will do with the game — if they will try to reboot it with a different vision or business model, or just let it rest for a bit. What would you like to see done with Concord?