$200M before the Sony acquisition and $200M after. It’s a little hard to believe. The story seems to only be coming from Colin Moriarty right now, but I trust Jordan Middler to consider it at least reasonably plausible if he wrote it up for VGC.
UPDATE: Sources not corroborating $400M number.
https://80.lv/articles/multiple-sources-dispute-concord-s-usd400-million-budget/
It didn’t cost 400 million. There’s no way a game like this can cost more than something like The Last of Us 2.
The credits roll is like legit an hour and a half long. Id believe it.
So funny story, people can waste a ton of money making something for way more than it should have cost.
Yeah it seems like the source is a podcast saying a number like after talking with a staff member of concord. I would have thought that people below executive/finance suite wouldn’t have that information. Not sure if they talked to someone in there but $400 million is just a bit steep.
Not impossible with tech salaries being what they are though, maybe it includes the buyout of the entire studio by Sony in that number though.
8 years of development under multiple publishers will bleed a lot of money. They also hired on a lot of “experienced devs” from different game studios to head the different departments, and presumably paid them well enough to get them to leave their original companies.
8 years ago, it was just an idea. It was only in development for 4 years.
From what I understand, it actually started concept development 10 years ago, with 8 years of active development.
This is probably the biggest lesson against the gamer mindset of “Give the developers time to work, and they’ll polish it to a shine.” Sometimes, even time doesn’t improve the end product if the idea wasn’t great. It might even indicate that on some instances where publishers scrapped a ‘cool’ project that was in the works, it was actually the right call. It might have been a Concord waiting to happen.
Hush, the accountants promised they’d fall for it!