Sony Interactive Entertainment has spent around 400 million US Dollars on Firewalk Studios’ canceled first-person hero shooter, Concord.
During the latest episode of Sacred Symbols podcast, host Colin Moriarty mentioned that an individual who worked on Concord reached out to him and told him that the game cost Sony around 400 million US Dollars to make. The hero shooter had entered alpha state in the first quarter of 2023. This was before Sony had acquired developer Firewalk Studios. Up until that point, the studio had already spent around 200 million US Dollars on the game. It’s unclear how much of this money is from Sony.
Moriarty revealed that from the point of Concord being in alpha state up until its launch, Sony had spent an additional 200 million US Dollars on the game, bringing the total investment to 400 million. According to his source, the game was in a “laughable” state when it was in alpha, which is why Sony felt the need to make the investment in order to get it to minimum viability. A major expense was having to outsource the game to other studios to finish building the game. Two fundamental areas, namely on-boarding and monetization, were not worked on at all.
Based on this information, as of now, Concord is the biggest game Sony has released from a budgetary standpoint. To put things into perspective, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2 cost 220 million US Dollars. Concord was internally billed as “the future of PlayStation”, with Star Wars-like potential, and a development culture of “toxic positivity” halted any negative feedback. As per Moriarty’s source, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Herman Hulst was internally a massive champion of the game.
Launch sales of Concord had been disappointing, with the number of copies sold estimated to be around 25,000. Sony Interactive Entertainment shut down the game’s servers on September 6, 2024, offering a refund to everyone who had bought it.
