$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/
The average person has absolutely no idea how much it costs to make a game, so any report that comes out for any game is enlightening. When Skullgirls developers tell people that it’ll cost $150k to make a single new character, and when other fighting game developers weighed in and said, “actually, that’s insanely cheap,” it level sets expectations for what a customer can actually expect out of a producer. The largest productions of their day during the era of the original Xbox and PS2 didn’t even typically come in at $50M per game. There are a lot of reasons why it can’t be exactly that anymore, but ballooning budgets are why the industry is in this spot where it’s wholly unsustainable, because if you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars and you didn’t make one of the most successful games in the history of the medium, it won’t be making its money back.
Iterating on a trend is smart business. Iterating on a trend over the course of 6 to 8 years is not, not only because it makes the game more expensive to make and raises the floor for success, but also because the audience for that trend has likely moved on. If Concord truly cost $400M to make, it adds one more data point for people to understand how much a game can cost, and maybe, just maybe, it will make more companies focus on building a game that they know they can afford to make rather than being all or nothing on one of the riskiest projects in history. That will keep people employed rather than rapid expansion from investment into a bubble and hundreds of layoffs when the project goes south.
You’re just grasping at straws here.
The average consumer doesn’t give a damn about how much a game costs to make, nor do they care about the cost to make content. Do you think people judge their experiences based on the cost it took to make said thing?
Grasping at straws again, but let’s entertain this for a moment. Did this article about the cost to make Concord teach you anything about the reasons why games cost so much to make?
What raises the floor of success is the growing expectations that gamers have of their games and the complexity of making them, not everyone trying to one-up each other on how much it costs to make them. Do you think publishers and studios think “oh shit, Sony spent $400mil, we should spend MORE!”?
Was this the line of thought that Microsoft had when they shut down Tango Gameworks for producing the cult hit Hi-Fi Rush?
How do you think an article like this can somehow change the minds of executives making the decision to overhire and lay people off?
My point is the same as I stated before: putting out unsubstantiated articles like these does absolutely nothing good for the industry. The only purpose it serves is ad-revenue for the tabloid, and potentially pulling more money out of the industry.