Failed PS5 exclusive Concord, dubbed ‘Star Wars-like’ and ‘the future of PlayStation,’ reportedly cost more than originally thought

The sad story of Concord, the failed FPS by Sony that lasted just two weeks before having its servers shut down, got even sadder today thanks to a new report.

Colin Moriarty, Sacred Symbols podcast host and former writer for IGN, reported on his show that Concord cost $400 million to make. The info came from a source who previously worked on the game and spoke to him under anonymity.

“The big thing that you really need to know here about this is that Concord cost about $400 million to make,” he said in a clip from Sacred Symbols on Sept. 20. Moriarty said there had already been about $200 million spent on the game before it went into an alpha state in early 2023. Previous reports claimed the game cost around $200 million total, but it’s instead been a $400 million loss for Sony, according to Moriarty.

“The scuttlebutt about Concord is that the game was in a laughable shape when it was shown…when the alpha was ready to go,” Moriarty said. “It was in such horrible shape that Sony felt like they needed to spend ($200 million) again to get the game [to a viable status].” Sony soon publicly announced its acquisition of Concord dev Firewalk Studios in April 2023.

Moriarty said that even more money was spent to “urgently outsource much of the game to other studios to finish building the game out,” and that both “onboarding” and “monetization” were not worked on at all when the game was originally shown.

The $400 million price tag was before even reaching live-service status, where it would cost additional “millions” each month to keep the game going, making Concord “the biggest game Sony has ever released from a budgetary standpoint from a first party or second party.”

In short, the huge money put into the game by Sony was to develop the game, then fix what was needed, and then any revenue that was made (Moriarty said it was “about $1 million in gross revenue”) had to be given back via refunds.

Moriarty said the game got into this unfortunate state because it was internally called “the future of PlayStation” and “a Star Wars-like project” that was “heavily championed” behind the scenes with a “toxic positivity vibe.”

“You weren’t allowed to say anything, apparently, internally about this game, about how something is wrong with it, character designs are not right, and so on and so forth,” he said. “They really truly believed, this was [Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO] Hermen Hulst’s baby, apparently. And he internally was himself a massive champion of the game.”

Concord has gone down as one of gaming’s biggest failures in memory even before Moriarty’s report, but today’s news makes the title even more of a head-scratching decision and acquisition by Sony.