We Were SHOCKED to Learn Concord Cost $400 Million
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ก.ย. 2024
- Concord was internally referred to as "The Future of PlayStation" with Star Wars-like potential, and a dev culture of "toxic positivity" halted any negative feedback. It cost $400,000,000.
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Is there a bigger flop in entertainment history? If so, tell us below.
Just think about this, this was considered to be one of the greatest movie flops of that era: Waterworld.
Budget $172-175 million
Box office $264.2 million
just let that sink in, it was still in the green lol.
Then again, even Star Wars isn't really Star Wars anymore. If you'd have told people that there would be Star Wars movies and TV shows that nobody wants to watch, nobody would have believed you.
They could have paid me 35 million to tell them no and save them 365 million
Given how many dumb decisions the sony bean counters make when it comes to buying stuff…I’d say your aiming too low, you can get at least 50 million before they notice
Hahahahahaha
Give me 15 mil and I’ll be happy to tell them. Pretty sure Sony would rather have 385 mil than -$400 mil.
It's PER YEAR. So they 'only' 50m. The real issue is how LONG it took.
A-ha moments, sold off the barrel! Did that sound medieval?
“We checked out all the major gaming subreddits and they said they loved the DEI elements in Concord!”
Are they playing it ?
@@114Riggs Nope. Never did! 🎉
@@winterFox2rlol perhaps they did because I can't believe there would be more reditter commentators than the highest number of players the game ever reached and almost no one else did which would explain it! If there were more praising it than the peak number of players it reached then like you said they never bought it 😂, oh well let's see if Sony learns for the better but I can't see it happening anytime soon.
I thpught the gamingcirclejerk "guys" will be playing it. 😂😂😂
I mean estimated total sales were something like 35k units or something like that?
Concord is now the biggest joke in gaming history. Sony must have been snorting something to think this was going to be a hit.
And the substance used was probably budgeted into the development cost.
The people in the room that weren’t wearing rainbow tinted glasses must have been extremely scared to go against it or were on quite the cocktail.
Snorting powdered soy and estrogen maybe.
They've been taking tons of Ls when it comes to exclusivity since PS4 era starting with Street Fighter V. Their latest inevitable L is going to be Silent Hill 2 Remake as it's exclusive to PS5 for a year and no Silent Hill fan is interested in that game as it's woke.
They went full California, never go full California.
"Stupidity has no limits." - PlayStation
There is no woke consumer, the audience that they're trying to court doesn't exist.
u dont talk logic to crazy people, the 10 rich woke people in sony just made that half a billion possible, supereasy.
That's very insulting to those woke consumers. Both of them.
@@wintersking4290 The Modern Audience does exist. All 5 of them! 🤣
It doesn't exist, yet. They're trying to create it.
Of course there is, the Dustbourn makers, and the other way around. It is what happens when you live in a bubble.
Sony thought Bungie was worth $3.6 billion.
Obviously the bean counters there have NO IDEA what theyre doing in the slightest...
The bean counters don’t understand the industry, it’s not just woke people that ruin the industry, it’s corporate bafoons who don’t know how the industry works.
Speaking of Bungie, aren't they the ones that convinced Naughty Dog and the higher-ups at Sony that the TLOU2 multiplayer wasn't worth the long term investment, which is what got the project cancelled? That decision seems even more laughable after the whole Concord disaster.
Gaming wise that does seem like the biggest fumble. But in entertainment, I'm still looking at Disney being the largest screwup. The entire board being puppet placements by the current CEO, the veering into politics because of the ambition of the CEO, and the CEO's obsession with legacy that led him to make continuous bad deals of multiple billions of dollars that on paper seems like a lot of value added to the company, but the profits made from those acquisitions have yet to make back the money they spent and it's already been many years since those acquisitions. In fact most of the IPs acquired were devalued because of their idiocy and even the once heralded Pixar studio has been turned into a shadow of their former selves.
Their parks are downgraded, the profit is down, their TV deals with linear media is eating away their monopoly on their content which in turn is devaluing their streaming content which has not earned back the money spent to create it and we've had Disney+ exist for many years now. The Hulu acquisition is a big fall into the red as well and the loss of political control over the land they're on is also now forcing them to adhere to the proper requirements and taxes of the state, meaning that every advantage they were abusing prior to fund the development of the parks by utilizing tax money under false pretense is no longer available, which is why they had some construction/development cancelled, because those projects were 50-60% funded through tax payer money that they no longer have access to.
Disney's screw up is already in the dozens of billions of dollars if I recall right, and with the governmental control loss they're looking at many more billions of losses over the years to come, especially with Universal at their heel creating a strong competitor.
So, take this with a pinch of salt, because it's a "friend of a friend" kind of claim but...I know a guy who says his best friend was one of a small group of focus-playtesters for Concord a year or two back. The guy claims within minutes of starting the game one of the first things he asked was "Why are all the characters so ugly?"
Less than fifteen minutes later they stopped him mid-game and asked him to leave. I can't reveal more because I don't know more. My friend won't say anything else on the subject because his friend had to sign NDAs and crap, and he's afraid of getting him into trouble.
I for one, believe it.
all the characters are fugly, so that person said the truth.
I don’t believe that at all
Sounds like the toxic positivity that was mentioned. The studio refused to accept any criticism of the game.
@@Pitman856 well it sounds plausible.
_"Why are all the characters so ugly?"_
I believe it, because it was also my exact 1st reaction when I saw the stream of early access of Concord.
Then I notices the pronouns and immediately dawned upon me that it is one of those *"This is not made for you" type* of games.
So nope out. Everything else happened related to this game are very predictable except for Sony actually quickly yanked this game out of existence in just 2 weeks after release and this $400M+.
But man, they really are very talented in making Sony lost that much of money. I sincerely hopes they got more works for Sony so Sony would lost even more money.
They seriously thought this would be a franchise at the level of Star Wars? Talk about hubris.
@@vincent207 maybe Disney Star wars lol
@@mtgusa How do you get a million dollar franchise? Take a billion dollar franchise and give it to Disney.
Nowadays they're getting pretty close to each other.
What's the matter? Don't want to play as trans-Thugnifcent, an obese They/Them in a blue coat, or a giant black lesbian? Bigot! I'll take my game to Reddit, then! They'll buy Concord for sure!
This is why studios should be legally obligated to report their budgets so shareholders can veto a project if it reaches this massive of a budget and has nothing to show for it.
20 developers and 300 inclusive game producers.
And 1/2 the budget to Sweet Baby.
sony got it right, IT IS the future of playstation.
You’re a fool. Regardless of this mess, Sony is making billions.
$400 million for under two weeks, roughly $30 million a game day.
And they made zero money becauae they did have to refund the people who bougbt it.
"It costs $400,000 to play Concord, for 20 minutes"
no srsly, do the math.
In 2016 Sony created "Sony interactive entertainment" and moved to California. From then on they lost all sense of reality. They took many insane decisions since. Like buying bungie for 3.7 Billions. Spending 400 millions on Concord. Promoting Hermen Hulst to CEO of playstation etc.. I would not be surprise to see this entire branch of sony go under in the next 10 years
I live in Japan and increasingly Sony is not regarded well and barely even seen as Japanese anymore. Many gamers here refer to their output as “contaminated”. I’m pretty sure that this and the PS5 Pro have gifted the Japanese market to Nintendo.
You ain't wrong. It's been mostly downhill since, magnified by TDS and the lockdowns.
There's another thing that cost $400 million, and crashed in equally spectacular fashion.
Who here remembers the _Costa Concordia?_
The Internet Historian remembers
Not even comparable. Costa Concordia had 6 years of service before the crash. It didn't crash on its maiden voyage.
@@AmartharDrakestone Actually, I think it is comparable (Even though I was incorrect, it was about 400 million Euro, which at the time was around 5-600 million dollars).
It gives you a sense of scale. We are dealing in the price range of Cruise Ships.
Plus, the Costa CONCORDia costing about the same as Concord is really funny.
@@AmartharDrakestone technically, no, but it's still funny
VADA BORDO, CAZZO!!
Rumor has it that the gaming division of Sony has been the only one making a decent profit for years. Concord is going to hurt them badly.
It’s not a rumour, and it’s the entertainment side of the company(gaming, movies and music) with PlayStation being the most profitable. Financial statements aren’t rumours.
That said, it will hurt but it isn’t crippling. Sony made almost 40bn in gaming revenue last year, 3x what Steam made. They’ll be fine.
Mark my words, Fairgame$ is next.
Makes me wonder how many more games like that are in development…
@@xenobreak1160 4 more live services to go, and they're going to likely all be like this.
If $400 million is TRUE, then a LOT of people need to be FIRED.
PERMANENTLY.
Firing is usually permanent. That’s how firing works.
DEI is expensive!
To be fair, it's definitely the next Star Wars. Disney Star Wars.
PlayStation was first introduced in 1994, and Concord losing so much money is an awkward way to celebrate PlayStation’s 30th anniversary…
I'm absolutely certain some heads are gonna roll. Too bad the executives either have enough money to retire or find another job as an executive elsewhere
Shot in the dark here, bit I think Concord is the first domino to what will be the great big Sony Playstation collapse, they wasted 200 to 400 million for a game they killed 2 weeks in and then had to save face by revealing a ps5 pro that ended up blowing just as hard because of the high price point and no disc try. Sony is done
I don’t think Sony is done, but they are being led by morons. Thee fact they bought a studio based in Washington state, one of the most expensive places in the US, where on average people are on 6 figure salaries…is it any wonder they overspent.
@@Scruffynerfherder10
I think Sony HQ in Japan has given too much deference to their SCE of America branch in California.
Sony HQ knows that the west is a much bigger market, so they default to the opinions of westerns to try and appeal to their targeted market. The problem is that “the westerners” they only listen to are Californians who aren’t interested in making appealing products to the west. They solely wish to use the PlayStation brand as a vehicle for their woke propaganda. They want their video games to make people think obesity is beautiful, people can switch genders at the drop of a hat, darker skin colors should be worshipped and glorified, and homosexuality is just as valid as heterosexuality.
That is the problem we’re seeing across all sorts of western industries. The execs are not interested in corporate profits, sales, or consumer interests. They only want to dish out whatever garbage they want to force others into viewing and feel they’re entitled to waste billions of company dollars for their brainwashing campaigns.
@@Scruffynerfherder10if they don't make changes soon they will be done
@@TimeBomb014X Sony is very big, Concorde is not enough to finish them. But maybe several more failures like this will do.
The funny thing is that even those higher numbers don't take into account how much they paid for the studio itself. So the numbers are probably even higher than that.
And those employees are STILL on the payroll.
Wait what!? The $400 million DID NOT include the purchase of the studio? @~@
I've seen this clip about four times today and missed that part somehow. How?... How was no one keeping track of the price tag for this train wreck.
Wokies: "It's other people's money! Who cares?"
It's all in line with their ideology. Imagine that.
I'm convinced Playstation pulled Concord and gave full refunds in order to do a tax write off. They know there's no saving it.
The law is dodgy on if they can do that. It was released, so they can’t claim it the way WB claimed Batman.
On "giving the game more than two weeks to succeed", player counts were already so low that only a couple games could be filled at any given time and it was becoming impossible to actually play the game, and continuing to drop. 5v5 = 10 people per game. Player counts were in the low double digits. When it gets to the point that you can't actually get in a game for lack of players, it's not going to spontaneously turn around. Your customers aren't getting what they paid for, give them their money back and shut things down.
They wanted it to be THEIR ‘Star Wars’ but they made ‘Disney Star Wars’
I didn't used to be so petty, but when ever I hear about Ivy League business bros and their dei pets loosing so much money I feel kind of satisfied.
That’s wild AF. How long can all of these big companies lose billions of dollars and stay afloat?
To think Sony PlayStation could invert those 400M to make Days Gone 2 or Bloodborne 2, SMH.
Sony could have eliminated world hunger with 400mil.$...Instead they made Concord...
End world hunger.... Come on now
it's kind of hilarious that Sony's about to follow up their Concord loss with another massive loss when their DEI Payday clone bombs on release.
Just for reference: the OG Bayonetta costed $8 million according to some sources. According to others, that's $8m marketing included.
Craig: What do you spend that money on? ME: The grift...DUH!
But it was 'the next Star Wars'... The next Disney Star Wars.
THAT MUCH money to make Concord?! And WE'RE the "talentless freaks?" It's ironic, isn't it?
NO WONDER, THEY'RE INCREASE THE PRICE OF PS5 PRO
Fairgame$ and Dragon Age are up next. The dip is coming.
@@ravagerxiii5488 "buy the dip"
Yea, this game stinks of people that looked at what entertainment was "popular" or "trending". None of this is shocking if you think about how corporate America works. Everything until Sony bought the company, I guarantee they didn't know the full extent until after they got Jim Ryan to "retire". This stinks of we will make our money back on pre-orders and season passes/mtx. No one in important roles understood how much of a nonstarter this game was in reality. The fact that this studio was former Bungie devs and the sort just shows that this was a game sold like a crypto coin.
To lose that much money... And then have the entire world laugh at you...
Holy cow
So basically Sony in realistic terms spent something around 500 million USD(if you take into consideration the marketing and fact that they bought the studio) for a multiplayer game that did not last 2 weeks in practical sense. I would not be surprised if HQ in Japan start asking some serious questions about NA branch spending habits.
As for is all this true?? Well we have to consider that AAA single player games have total development(base game, patches and expansions) costs of reaching over 400 million USD nowadays so yeah i personally believe its true.
Concord did as well as sanitation wipes made of sandpaper.
Colin was one of the best journalist in the entire video game industry when he was working as a journo. He's one of the few I buy what he says without concrete proof.
You wouldn't live on a beach Craig, you'd make a multitude of games that aren't DEI cause you are a hero. :)
If we assume the studio(s) had 200 employees total (they didn't. They had less) and we assume it was $400,000,000.00 over 8 years, that is $50,000,000.00 a year. That is $250k per employee if the money was only spent on wages. It wasn't, of course, but just to give people an idea of the money involved with easy math, it's staggering how *BAD* this game was considering the overwhelming cost.
You’re not factoring in contractors, overtime (crunch), marketing, publishing costs and “consultant fees”.
But, the studio is based in Washington state, which is one of the most expensive places to live and work in the US. With an average salary of 6 figures for people working there.
So all in all, you may be right.
Even if it was substantially less than the $400 million touted, this whole saga just shows the complete and utter disconnect games companies have from their player bases. The funniest thing is that I can see a similar scenario happening to D&D, where all the decision makers thing they will appeal to an exciting and new 'modern audience', only for them to later discover that no such thing exists.
Could part of the money have been costs towards amazon for that new video game show?
Huh, didn't even realize that was Chris Ray Gun until the end of the video. Don't think I've seen him since a few months after "the worst thing ever" happened in 2016.
What was that again?
@@are3287Trump’s election win
Cost in game development blew up and just kept expanding like a dying star. Concord is the greatest possible example of the absolute worst case of a modern AAA spending frenzy going bad. Sony sure got burned.
What happened to the first 200 mil? What was developed with the money?
The early concept art made for characters looked different to what the final designs were. I bet firewalk did nothing for years and took the money from Sony, and sony panicked and decided to take a write off as a result.
@@Scruffynerfherder10
Most likely, development on the game was stopped and restarted multiple times. What people don't understand about video game development is that a game can start out going in one direction, then the publisher won't like how it's going, so they'll stop development and restart in a different direction. Of course, all the time and money spent on the game up until that point is lost but still counts toward the cost and development of the final game which looks nothing like how it was originally envisioned. Oh, and then there are times when developers will work on something for months only to cut it because either it's not working or there's not enough time in the schedule to finish it.
@@G360LIVEfrom what the video shows, seems like they were struggling to go in a direction and wasted a lot of money, tbh it makes sense if Sony just decided to buy the studio to try and fix the game, but couldn’t and panicked and had all hands on deck from multiple of other studios to fix the problems. It’s a lot like Disney, they’ll put a test screening for a movie, and reshoot the whole thing before the film comes out to get the scores better.
It went straight into the pockets of the Democrat party as they are the financial backers and controlling force of all the "Social Justice Think-tanks " and "Political Consultancy Agencies" that these brainlet California CEOs hire.
How many more flops before companies learn that current day market research is broken? The only ones that did it right are Capcom who went "Hey, loyal Capcom fans, what is it you like about our games?" And the results were what we have been saying since Gamergate 1, "Cool characters, cool gameplay, cool stories, screw everything else".
Who pocketed all that money? It sure didn't go into the game!
Feel free to correct or add what I’m missing but let’s work with $400m in costs, 25k units shipped with only 4K sales.
$400m in costs
~160k in sales
Subtract steam/epic cuts for sales estimating about 20% average
Roughly $130k in sales vs $400m in costs is about -99.97% return on investment.
Now factor in inflation for the initial investment and you’re looking around a penny in return for every $100 spent
Edit: forgot to factor not all sales are through other platforms, regional pricing variation and also was probably generous in the 4K sales because achievement tracking puts it closer to 3k. So for simplicity let’s call everything in the edit a wash.
I think it's $0 or negative profits. They refunded all the sales when they pulled the plug..
@@kaleiohulee6693 I’m speaking in terms on return on investment, of course the ledger in the red. -99.97 ROI just means they only recouped .03% of their costs
@@echoesofmalachor3700 They didnt recoup anything because they refunded it, not that makes a big of a difference since there were barely any sales
@@are3287Another interesting question. How many of the player base were devs and paid gaming journalists who all got the game for free? I think the ratio was a new record.
Heavy Weapons Guy: "it cost 400 million dollars to release this game..........for 12 days"
Heavy Weapons Guy :"HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"
I'm with Vara on this, I call BS on that being pure development/marketing costs.
Crowdfunding for a Concord documentary? Just give Matt McMuscles time, I'm sure he and his team are looking into it.
Oh look, it is disgraced short king Chris Raygun. Have not seen him since he went insane and tried to have a balanced opinion instead of being right.
@@DragonFruitXVI Is that him? I didn't recognize it!
@@igorbb2900 Yes I recall him making this podcast.
That was the reason why PS5 Pro sells US$700 per unit to compensate the huge loss in Concord 😂
It would make sense if it cost $400M, since they refunded everyone, and de-listed the game. The tax write-off would be so far more profitable than sales considering the steam PPC of 81, it's the obvious choice to make.
Concord documentary is a golden idea. This is a piece on gaming history.
I hope this finally puts toxic positivity into the lexicon of gaming industry. “Yes man” discussion has been taboo for too long. Same goes for game reviewers especially.
A Concord documentary might be the only way Concord makes any money. This is insane.
I'm so glad that I transitioned to a neutral gaming platform - PC. Because decisions like this will crash the industry over night.
Hermen Hulst gets a bonus while they fire everyone else
The entertainment industry this past few decades has just been a cancerous, insulting, wasteful nightmare.
This is why the PS Pro reveal was so bare bones. They were planning on basing their entire new generation around Concord and had to cut it out at the last minute.
Sony wanted their own OverWoke! Problem is nobody else did!
Trust me my dear, you can trust the pride of Long Island.
Don't forget, it's 8 years of development with a team of 150 people. As a comparison point, Spider-Man 2 cost $300 million and that didn't have anywhere near an 8 year development cycle. I always felt the $150-$200 million estimate sounded too small based on what I know of game development costs. Most AAA studios go through 30-50 million per year (which includes salaries, computers, mocap equipment, software, renting a building, electricity, bonuses, travel, voice actors, outsourcing, advertising, team social events etc.), and this team was on the larger size, so I'd expect them to be much closer to the higher end of that number.
Concord exists as another example of how money doesn't buy competence.
At this point I truly do hope Concord is the future of Sony. Literally. Going down. With the sort of morality they push its the least they deserve.
This reminds me of some famous movie failures where they poured money into something and nobody wanted it
$400 million is approximately the production budget of Avengers Endgame (although that doesn't include marketing). Guardians of the Galaxy 2 had about $200 million - assuming they spent the same on marketing (very common to do), imagine if that movie grossed $1 million at the box office (estimated worldwide gross for that movie was actually about $860 million). That's the level of flop were taking about.
if the game was in development for 8 years that number makes far more sense..... still insanely high, but how many people were supposedly working on this every year?
Thank you, Vara, for being one of the few commentators on this with any sense.
400 million sounds unbelievable, but considering the credit screen for this game is over an hour long, that makes it somewhat believable.
For comparison, Elden Ring's credit scene is about 8 mins.
Didn't RDR2 cost like $500 million? You could actually see the money on screen with that game. Where did the money go with Concord?
They shut down so quickly because the player numbers were too low for a sustainable PvP experience. Leaving the game up would just result in people trying and failing to get a match.
Surely Amazon can't release that show without mentioning the true failure of Concord. 8 years of work and an obscene amount of money thrown at the project only for a couple of hundred people to play for less than 2 weeks. The ET on Atari controversy has nothing on this
Sony's weird. And their studios are weird. When Sony shut down their Liverpool studio (one of their most storied and oldest studios, formerly known as Psygnosis), the people there started Firebrand. Firebrand signed with CIG to develop a Battlefield-like Star Citizen spinoff game called Theaters of War. They worked on that for quite a while, then Sony bought Firebrand. Why did Firebrand leadership agree to sell the new studio to the same corporate entity that had just fired them? I don't know. Is that acquisition why the Star Citizen spinoff game was canned? I don't know. But some of the folks working on Theaters of War left Firebrand to join CIG in the wake of the acquisition, so there's that.
what do you expect from a company that thinks 700 usd is a reasonable price for a console?
this is a PS being hoisted by his own petard
Sony thought this was going to be the next big follow-up after Overwatch (which itself was very woke) like League of Legends was after DOTA2. Boy were they wrong...
i wouldnt have believed it till i saw the credits. 1 hour and 12 minutes, for context elden ring was just 8 minutes, the cost was probably more on redundant workers that were just there and still got paid for doing nothing
That money could've financed a second season of 'The Acolyte.'
Just seeing Vara in stark contrast with Craig is fun. I know everyone forgot, but FFXVI.
I was shocked you actually went with that factless "400 million" fart information source. But then I realised its sidescrollers.
Just remember, GTA V development cost just above half a billion. It got that back and some in a day.
Concord has officially become the Fyre Festival of video games.
It's actually not that big a deal when you realize that's over 8 years. It's only 50m a year. Now the sheer incompetence of the Publisher ran it up to 400m, which is a lot, but in terms of yearly expenditures, as in year over year? Not really. Not when Halo Infinite which has been around for five years and allegedly cost 500m to make (That's 100m per year spent).
Any future DEI game, or media, should be watched very very closely from now on, or denied a chance at viability checks.
This could be a defining moment for better gaming. Concord may have done us all a favour
I know exactly what they spent all the money on:
"Alright, code monkeys! Our panel of diversity consultants have spent a month reviewing your work, and they have determined that FEATURE X on CHARACTER Y is culturally insensitive. You will have to alter all of the textures, character models, cutscenes, voice lines, game mechanics, and promotional materials to remove references to FEATURE X. Also, you will have to invent a new feature to replace the missing elements from CHARACTER Y and replace all of those textures, character models, cutscenes, voice lines, game mechanics, and promotional materials that we told you to get rid of. Also, make it still functionally playable; game balance is optional."
Joint-CEO’s? What is this a real life episode of the Office?
*with just 50 million, I could concept a game better than Concord right now.*
I think some sort of money laundering is at work here. There's no way these genius investors saw that game midway through development and never once questioning the creative process.
We need to talk about the amount of organisational damage this will have done, internally, at Sony. Confidence in Hermen Holtz's decision-making must be in a shambles now and the shareholders must be looking at the entire PIE subdivision as a liability to sell off or fold back into Sony Japan as a matter of urgency.
Meanwhile, no-one is going to risk their careers fighting Holtz's corner for any of his other 'babies' and staff won't put any serious effort into these projects, production of post-production (marketing, merchandising, etc) for it. No-one will believe it is worth the time or effort or the risk to their own careers by having some of the mess splatter on them..
This feels like a scam, and that Hulst guy's the collaborator
Then again there's this quote about malice and incompetence...
I didn't play it, but from what I heard the netcode actually worked, at least, which is more than most games can say.
Diversity isnt a checkbox; the problem with DEI games is that they treat diversity as a checkbox and nothing more.
Bloated and uninspired. Then they use rediculous spending like this as justification for increasing their prices, saying it costs more to make games now...