Concord was “too good to fail,” according to sources, the budget was $400,000,000

Sony thought PS5 would flop Concord ‘the future of PlayStation’, say insiders who suggest a culture of ‘toxic positivity’ killed the game.

It’s no secret what happened to PlayStation 5 exclusive Concord , which ended its launch after less than two weeks. But the truth about what went on behind the scenes and how the game got to where it is today may never be revealed.

Rumours emerged last week that the director had dropped out and the game would never return, however these have not been confirmed, as has the suggestion that the game’s total budget was $400 million (£300 million).

That seems unlikely (the most expensive film ever made is Star Wars: The Force Awakens , which grossed $447 million) and there’s already some disagreement among industry insiders about whether that’s true, but everyone agrees that the game’s biggest problem is what’s being called “toxic positivity” among developers and Sony executives.

The accusations started with a podcaster Colin Moriartywho claimed Sony was calling Concord the “future of PlayStation,” with “Star Wars-like potential” and a developer culture based on “toxic positivity.”

This means that the developer and Sony were so confident that the game would be a huge success that they ignored negative reviews and voices of dissent.

This was quickly confirmed by Ethan Gach, senior reporter at Kotaku, who described “a head-in-the-sand mentality carried over from Bungie’s studio roots. A sense that the game would succeed because the team was too good to fail.”

Concord was developed by Firewalk Studios over a period of almost eight years – at the outset, Overwatch, for which Concord is a perfect fit, was at the peak of its popularity.

The Firewalk team includes several former Bungie developers, including director Ryan Ellis, who previously served as creative director on Destiny 2.

Moriarty also suggested that Concorde cost $400 million to make, which at first glance seems unlikely given the fact that the game didn’t seem all that expensive, there was little marketing, and the highest confirmed budget (in the sense that it was revealed as a result of a hack into developer Insomniac’s servers) is around $300 million for Spider-Man 2.

Gach said that the $400 million is “that’s not the number I heard.” Others were less diplomatic in their responses, with Chris Dring of GamesIndustry.biz insisting that “no game has that kind of development budget.”

In the same Twitter thread, The Verge senior editor Tom Warren agreed with Dring and insisted that “you only have to look at the funding for Unlike Monsters to see that.” this is nonsense.

This is a reference to Moriarty’s claims on his podcast that around $200 million had already been spent on Concord by previous owner UnlikeMonsters before Sony acquired Firewalk. Sony then reportedly spent the same amount to finish the game, incurring significant outsourcing costs.

Even $200 million is an extreme video game budget, especially since Moriarty doesn’t claim the $400 million figure includes the unspecified amount Sony paid to acquire Firewalk.

But whether the $400 million figure is accurate or not has no bearing on the rest of the claims. It’s clear that something went terribly wrong at Sony and Firewalk when they worked on Concorde.

The question remains whether we’ll ever learn anything concrete, but it almost certainly won’t be information from Sony or Firework.

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