Comment on Sony’s Concord reportedly cost $400M to develop | VGC
chryan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
This is absolute bullshit.
Firewalk, the studio that made Concord, used to be a part of a parent startup called ProbablyMonsters. Firewalk was sold to Sony last year, in April 2023.
ProbablyMonsters only had a total Series A investment of $250 million, and Firewalk was not the only studio that it was funding - it had multiple.
But let’s just say all $250mil went to Firewalk )of which is impossible because ProbablyMonsters still exists and has other studios). In order to hit this mythical $400mil figure, Sony would have had to spend $150mil in ONE YEAR.
The most significant cost of making a AAA game is paying for the developers, of which Firewalk has about 160 of them. In what world would Sony pay over 900k per developer to see Concord through to the finish line?
The more likely figure that each developer got paid on average is about 180k, that’s still just short of 30mil for 1 year.
Firewalk didn’t start with 160, so you can’t extrapolate that cost to its 8 years of development.
Don’t believe this horseshit.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They also outsourced a ton to make CG cut-scenes and such, which can rack up a bill very quickly. ProbablyMonsters was an incubator, not a parent company, as I understand it. I too am skeptical of there only being one source in Colin Moriarty, but I trust Jordan Middler to vet the story, even if he isn’t corroborating it, and as others have mentioned, the credits are literally over an hour long, which is evidence that supports the high costs.
chryan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I used to work at ProbablyMonsters. It’s most definitely not an incubator.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
If you were in such a role that you could correct anything in the story, I’d encourage you to reach out to a journalist and do so.
chryan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Unless someone from Sony AND ProbablyMonsters confirms the real numbers, I would have nothing concrete to add to the validity of the claims, other than I think it’s bullshit.
Br even if I did have this bulletproof info, why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?
News like this doesn’t do the industry and the people who work in it any favors other than to serve the masturbatory curiosity of people who claim “I can’t believe they spent this much on a game that was clearly going to fail!”
All this kind of reporting does is continue to pull money away from investors who are willing to take chances on new teams making new games (regardless of how derivative they might seem), and cause anguish for the passionate developers who poured their lives into what they believed would have succeeded.
The games industry is in absolute shambles now thanks to years of psychopathic ravaging from large corporations with milking profits, studio shutdowns and layoffs.
Contributing to unconstructive reporting will only worsen it, and I would instead encourage you to ignore news like this.