CONCORD THREAD

[rusty_shackleford]

I remember when the Diablo 3 game director complained to a Blizzard higger up that he was harrassed by players.

[RangerBoo]

Allegedly Sony spent 400$ mln on this.

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/09 ... laystation

We promise we’re not trying to rub it in, but Concord is such a historic flop that some of these stories simply can’t be overlooked. Speaking on the latest episode of Sacred Symbols, veteran ex-IGN reporter Colin Moriarty said he’d spoken to a developer on the first-person shooter, and claims the game cost approximately $400 million, making it the most expensive PlayStation first-party project ever. That’s an astounding, bordering on unbelievable, number if accurate.

Wow, I was right about the cost. This goes to to show just how delusional Sony is. They really thought that this game was going to be the next big thing. As I stated before, one look at those character designs and a competent executive would have known that this project was DOA. This is what happens when a Japanese company moves their base of operations to California. The SEGA executives were were smart enough to can Hyenas and have it be a tax write off. The Californian brain rotted executives at Sony really believe that the "Modern Audience" is a thing and wasted half a billion on this abortion. I doubt Sony will learn anything from this failure and go right back to wasting more money on projects like Concord. They'll find that modern audience, someday!

[UltraFan123]

I doubt Sony will learn anything from this failure and go right back to wasting more money on projects like Concord. They'll find that modern audience, someday!

I believe that's what FairGame$ is, basically. lol

[Kronus]

Corporate game directors do not have full freedom. They do what the board approves and tells them to do. I remember when the Diablo 3 game director complained to a Blizzard higger up that he was harrassed by players. The higher up then said the director wasnt the one to blame but he was.

And this one. This one's unforgettable.

[Rand]

According to the latest information, Concord is believed to have eaten over 400 million in its 8 years of development.
The studio raised 200 million to work on the game for the six years between when development began to the end of 2022 when an early, shaky alpha was shown to Sony early in 2023.
They had done very, very little.
In the meantime, Sony had recently purchased the studio (purchase price not included in the 400 million figure) and became very worried, because the clueless incompetent American corporate ***-clowns mismanaging Playstation development at the California HQ had gotten themselves to believe that this game was their Overwatch and Star Wars (their description) all rolled into one so it HAD to succeed. (Lol.)
So they spent another 200 million getting the game to launch and marketing.
They outsourced a lot of the work to other development companies so as to have all the work done in parallel, because Firewalk was so far behind where Sony needed them to be.

Imagine spending $400 million and not understanding seriously that the game was a bucket of turds.
The highest management was clueless about how bad their development team was, how bad the executives under them were incompetent and lying, and how terrible the game was.
When one of us could have walked in, looked at the art assets, played the game for 30 minutes and told them "This game will be dead in a couple of months at most, and the best player numbers will make New World look robust."

[RangerBoo]

Holy **** is Sony screwed.

[DDC]

I really want to know how that $400 million was spent, exactly what each of these assclowns was doing day-to-day during the development of the game. That is enough to pay 250 people $200k/yr each for eight years. What in the **** could they possibly have been doing during that time? This is not a resource-intensive game. It doesn't have a huge open world or complex gameplay systems. The graphics are simple, the levels are simple, the gameplay is simple. A competent indie team of 10-15 people could have created the exact same output in 2-3 years. WHAT WERE THEY DOING?? Take the texture guy for instance...certainly he can make enough textures for that game in a year or two. What was he doing for the other six?

And on the subject of the dev who thinks we'll have nothing left to play . . . let's just say video games are one thing where the supply already vastly overshoots the demand. They could literally stop making games entirely and the already existing games would be more than enough to occupy me for the remainder of my lifetime. And development has evolved to the point that tiny teams of 1-5 devs are now able to create games on par with the AA niche games I grew up playing. Really, the only thing of note that would be lost if every big developer was nuked from orbit is the ability to make a new GTA game, but that happens less than once a decade now anyways.

[wndrbr]

You can't spend $400M on something like this. It was an embezzlement / money laundering scheme.

[Rand]

I really want to know how that $400 million was spent, exactly what each of these assclowns was doing day-to-day during the development of the game. That is enough to pay 250 people $200k/yr each for eight years. What in the **** could they possibly have been doing during that time? This is not a resource-intensive game. It doesn't have a huge open world or complex gameplay systems. The graphics are simple, the levels are simple, the gameplay is simple. A competent indie team of 10-15 people could have created the exact same output in 2-3 years. WHAT WERE THEY DOING?? Take the texture guy for instance...certainly he can make enough textures for that game in a year or two. What was he doing for the other six?

And on the subject of the dev who thinks we'll have nothing left to play . . . let's just say video games are one thing where the supply already vastly overshoots the demand. They could literally stop making games entirely and the already existing games would be more than enough to occupy me for the remainder of my lifetime. And development has evolved to the point that tiny teams of 1-5 devs are now able to create games on par with the AA niche games I grew up playing. Really, the only thing of note that would be lost if every big developer was nuked from orbit is the ability to make a new GTA game, but that happens less than once a decade now anyways.

You won't like the new GTA game.
Rockstar has revealed they're deeply worried in several ways about the reception GTA 6 is going to receive.
If they're capable of noticing and being worried, imagine how **** and pozzed and ****** it must be.

[1998]

Corporate game directors do not have full freedom. They do what the board approves and tells them to do. I remember when the Diablo 3 game director complained to a Blizzard higger up that he was harrassed by players. The higher up then said the director wasnt the one to blame but he was.

Maybe in some cases. But this whole thing "without evil publisher we would have full creative control and could create such awesome games" failed pretty hard during kickstarter days...

[KOS-MOS]

I'm pretty sure it cost them over 400 million, and is still costing them money today.

Think of all the copies they've had to refund, the physical copies around the world that have to be sent back, all the merchs they can't sell... I suppose it's all going to be destroyed since it's no longer of any use?

All the contracts that have to be cancelled, the additional content that's been planned, probably already developed and has to be thrown away etc....

It's just crazy. Anyone, even a non-gamer, even your clueless mother, could have taken one look at this design and said it would be a huge failure. I just can't understand how all of this is possible.

[rusty_shackleford]

The tv show episode likely was part of the marketing budget also

[KOS-MOS]

The tv show episode likely was part of the marketing budget also

That's right, I forgot about that one too... ****, this is crazy. We're living in a truly historic moment.

[WaterMage]

[UltraFan123]

I'm pretty sure it cost them over 400 million, and is still costing them money today.

Think of all the copies they've had to refund, the physical copies around the world that have to be sent back, all the merchs they can't sell... I suppose it's all going to be destroyed since it's no longer of any use?

All the contracts that have to be cancelled, the additional content that's been planned, probably already developed and has to be thrown away etc....

It's just crazy. Anyone, even a non-gamer, even your clueless mother, could have taken one look at this design and said it would be a huge failure. I just can't understand how all of this is possible.

My guess? The suits at the top who are affiliated with Blackrock most likely believed that by this year their social engineering meant to demoralize us would have already succeeded and we would be mindless sheep who gladly consume any ugly slop they made. Instead this is the year when we all began to awake, funnily enough.

[RangerBoo]

I really want to know how that $400 million was spent, exactly what each of these assclowns was doing day-to-day during the development of the game. That is enough to pay 250 people $200k/yr each for eight years. What in the **** could they possibly have been doing during that time? This is not a resource-intensive game. It doesn't have a huge open world or complex gameplay systems. The graphics are simple, the levels are simple, the gameplay is simple. A competent indie team of 10-15 people could have created the exact same output in 2-3 years. WHAT WERE THEY DOING?? Take the texture guy for instance...certainly he can make enough textures for that game in a year or two. What was he doing for the other six?

And on the subject of the dev who thinks we'll have nothing left to play . . . let's just say video games are one thing where the supply already vastly overshoots the demand. They could literally stop making games entirely and the already existing games would be more than enough to occupy me for the remainder of my lifetime. And development has evolved to the point that tiny teams of 1-5 devs are now able to create games on par with the AA niche games I grew up playing. Really, the only thing of note that would be lost if every big developer was nuked from orbit is the ability to make a new GTA game, but that happens less than once a decade now anyways.

Given the fact that Sony moved its headquarters to California and the entire West Coast has diversity quotas for all their major industries and gives tax breaks for companies that pander in DEI I think people here can guess what happened. Sony hired incompetent diversity hires (women, LGBTQ, racial minorities) who had no experience in game development to work on this project. This project should have only cost around 100 million and taken only a few years to make with a small team of 20-30 people. However, most of that time and money was used to probably train these new diversity hires on how to use different programs and what not. Not to mention that these diversity hires probably purposely dragged on the project for as long as they can in order to keep getting paid. Part of me can't fault these people for what they did. They were just looking for a easy paycheck that paid the bills. However, these people have no business working in the games industry. Sony learned the hard way on why DEI and hiring people based on diversity tends to ruin a project more than helps it.

[Hauberk]

Buuuuurrrrrn

[rusty_shackleford]

You can't spend $400M on something like this.

If you include marketing, it's probably not that far off. They had nonstop ads playing on platforms like tiktok.

[KnightoftheWind]

Firewalk is apparently one of Sony's most expensive studios to operate, on a per-head basis. Real estate costs aren't cheap either. AAA games typically spend a few years in pre-production alone, which is probably what happened here. Just discussing the ideas for the game and prototyping it probably took 4-5 years, and the remaining few were spent actually making the thing. So it's a case of hundreds of diversity hires dragging their feet, outsourcing most of the work anyway to some pajeets, and then all the marketing costs associated with this slop. CGI trailers, shorts, commissioning that short for Amazon. This was a very large, very expensive effort that Sony went all in on. They were, somehow, confident enough in this **** that they pulled all the stops. No expense was spared.

[Alberto Pizzaolla]

I really want to know how that $400 million was spent, exactly what each of these assclowns was doing day-to-day during the development of the game. That is enough to pay 250 people $200k/yr each for eight years. What in the **** could they possibly have been doing during that time? This is not a resource-intensive game. It doesn't have a huge open world or complex gameplay systems. The graphics are simple, the levels are simple, the gameplay is simple. A competent indie team of 10-15 people could have created the exact same output in 2-3 years. WHAT WERE THEY DOING?? Take the texture guy for instance...certainly he can make enough textures for that game in a year or two. What was he doing for the other six?

And on the subject of the dev who thinks we'll have nothing left to play . . . let's just say video games are one thing where the supply already vastly overshoots the demand. They could literally stop making games entirely and the already existing games would be more than enough to occupy me for the remainder of my lifetime. And development has evolved to the point that tiny teams of 1-5 devs are now able to create games on par with the AA niche games I grew up playing. Really, the only thing of note that would be lost if every big developer was nuked from orbit is the ability to make a new GTA game, but that happens less than once a decade now anyways.

Realistically, given how long the game took to develop, it's likely that the project started out as something half competent. But over time, as trends changed and the studio bloated, the vision was lost.
Devs came and went until the studio makeup was completely different, and with them came completely different goals. Somewhere along the line "diversity" became important. To the executives funding this game it seemed like a good thing that the project was evolving to chase current trends. And they were more than happy to pump as much money into it as was requested by the devs. With such a long development timeline it's likely that no one really noticed that the game had become something completely different to what they started out with, either. To them it might have seemed like small changes in the moment that were all still derived from the original vision. Only after the game was revealed and audiences gave their reactions was it clear to the executives what their game had become. But by then it was too late. They had to at least ship the game and hope to God that the dev team was right about the hate just coming from "a loud minority of trolls".

Also, as an aside: The fact that Sony automatically refunded everyone who bought the game really underscores just how much of a failure Concord was. Usually companies will offer refunds "as requested" in the hopes that some customers will forget so they can keep at least some of the money they made from selling it. But in Concords case they just automatically refunded every single purchase. Meaning that the amount of money they made from the game was the equivalent of a rounding error for them. So insignificantly low that there wasn't any point in trying to keep any of it.

[1998]

Firewalk is apparently one of Sony's most expensive studios to operate, on a per-head basis. Real estate costs aren't cheap either. AAA games typically spend a few years in pre-production alone, which is probably what happened here. Just discussing the ideas for the game and prototyping it probably took 4-5 years, and the remaining few were spent actually making the thing. So it's a case of hundreds of diversity hires dragging their feet, outsourcing most of the work anyway to some pajeets, and then all the marketing costs associated with this slop. CGI trailers, shorts, commissioning that short for Amazon. This was a very large, very expensive effort that Sony went all in on. They were, somehow, confident enough in this **** that they pulled all the stops. No expense was spared.

That's the crazy part. Basically everyone who is actually playing games could have told them that **** will tank, and somehow these execs are so deep into their own **** that they thought they had a slam dunk on their hands.

[gerey]

You can't spend $400M on something like this. It was an embezzlement / money laundering scheme.

It's laughably easy to spend shitloads of money and have nothing to show for it afterwards if a company has reached the right critical mass of retardation. I've seen it happen at companies I've worked for a myriad of reasons - sometimes it was indeed someone in the management embezzling funds or being in cahoots with suppliers to fleece the company, but more often than not it was plain and simple retardation.

See, when you hire mouthbreathers, they tend to do mouthbreather things - like ordering an expensive and highly specialized machine to be moved halfway across Europe without first checking if it can fit through the door of the warehouse (this happened twice, on the same project BTW), nobody bothering to read the 400+ page report on required safety standards all contractors have to adhere to, and then being forced to scramble and buy the necessary (and highly expansive) equipiment at any price, under immense time pressure, while everyone is aware you're ****** and will bleed you dry.

Or how about a bunch of geniuses deciding to cook a meal in a hotel room, trigger the fire alarm, have the hotel evacuated and summoning fire departments from three counties over, and then having to pay the hotel, guest and government for damages, in Switzerland?

Or maybe a certified scholar getting the bright idea to wake up the crane operator by throwing a wrench at his cabin, breaking the window in the process and damaging the very sensitive, very expensive high-tech touch-screen interface?

I could write a whole book on the kind of **** I've witnessed and been required to deal with because of dumbfucks, now imagine how bad a company wholly run and staffed by low-IQ liberals is gonna be like.

So yes, if your company is staffed by cretins money just disappears. Not only do you need more people to do the same job (White/East Asian, heterosexual) men would do at a fraction of the cost and time, but your woke underlings will keep ******* things up and need to redo the same task over and over and over again.

[gerey]

The tv show episode likely was part of the marketing budget also

Was the $400 million with or without the marketing? Because if it's not, then it's likely the project cost the $600 million and up.

Rockstar has revealed they're deeply worried in several ways about the reception GTA 6 is going to receive.

When you've invested a cool $2 billion into a project, laced it with divisive politics and plan to release it during one of the most bitterly contested election seasons, or during a presidential term that will be rife with partisan mudslinging and vicious culture war exchanges, on top of having an exclusivity deal with Sony, whose console has been floundering, with a PS5Pro that has been poorly received and is not projected to sell much (and is rumored to not even be able to run GTA VI at 60fps anyway), I'd be worried too.

Rockstar needs GTA VI to be the single most successful media product in the history of the human race, yet the company that made all the previous games is not the same as the one today.

[DagothGeas5]

This all reminds me a bit of the Rings of Power and other such disasters. Billions were spent on that one.

[Decline]

Corporate game directors do not have full freedom. They do what the board approves and tells them to do. I remember when the Diablo 3 game director complained to a Blizzard higger up that he was harrassed by players. The higher up then said the director wasnt the one to blame but he was.

Maybe in some cases. But this whole thing "without evil publisher we would have full creative control and could create such awesome games" failed pretty hard during kickstarter days...

There is no systemic solution. Some people are simply better than others. These better people then need to lock themselves in a room and make a game instead of doing something worthwhile with their lives.

It is a fundamental problem that can only be solved by creating a society that does not know real problems, i.e. the 80s and 90s in the west.

[Rand]

Was the $400 million with or without the marketing? Because if it's not, then it's likely the project cost the $600 million and up.

Marketing was in the 30 to 50 million range.
30 to 50...
for ADVERTISING...
The amount of money wasted on advertising is staggering.
80% of advertising is worthless. I may be underestimating by up to 15% as well.

[J1M]

Have you considered that the execs knew this would flop but were happy to keep their inflated compensation for 6 years while waiting for it to hit the market? Perhaps even intentionally delaying the launch? That admitting they wasted 200m would have caused them to miss out on 4 years of rent seeking?

People respond to incentives and the incentives for individuals rarely align with a larger organization's best interests.

[Manny V]

Buuuuurrrrrn

[1998]

Have you considered that the execs knew this would flop but were happy to keep their inflated compensation for 6 years while waiting for it to hit the market? Perhaps even intentionally delaying the launch? That admitting they wasted 200m would have caused them to miss out on 4 years of rent seeking?

People respond to incentives and the incentives for individuals rarely align with a larger organization's best interests.

Then they would have drastically reduced the marketing budget and cut other costs. Sure, once they have started to accept pre-orders they must have known but this was only a few months (?) before launch.

[UltraFan123]

People respond to incentives and the incentives for individuals rarely align with a larger organization's best interests.

I do agree that this is generally true most of the time, but in the case of Concord I find hard to believe tbh because the signs of failure were right there in front of them since the beginning.