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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.





Moriarty claims that Firewalk Studios had spent around $200 million at the start of last year, prior to Sony’s acquisition of the developer. The title was originally being funded by Probably Monsters, with PlayStation signing on as a publishing partner. It’s unclear, then, how much of that original $200 million had come out of the platform holder’s pocket.
However, when it acquired the studio and took full control over the project, it allegedly spent a further $200 million getting the title ready to release. According to Moriarty, the game was in a disastrous state as recently as 18 months ago, with no player onboarding or monetisation designed. Outsourcing was required to get the project into shape, and to be fair, what did release was relatively polished – albeit extremely barebones.

Moriarty explained: “It’s the biggest game Sony’s ever released from a budgetary standpoint from a first-party. There are games in development at PlayStation first-party that are more expensive from a budgetary standpoint, but as of the games that have come out so far, like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, this game cost more. And they lost all of it.”

He then goes on to explain why PlayStation spent so much on the game: “It was heavily championed behind-the-scenes. The term had been used verbatim behind-the-scenes that ‘Concord is the future of PlayStation’. This game was referred to internally as a Star Wars-like project for Sony. It was designed to be repeatedly revisited, not just in games but in cross-media; we’ve seen little bits of that like the weekly stories and the inclusion in Amazon’s Secret Levels.”

According to Moriarty, a sense of “toxic positivity” pervaded the project. “You weren’t allowed to say anything internally about this game, about how something’s wrong with it or how the character designs aren’t right,” he claims. “This was Hermen Hulst’s baby, apparently. He internally was a massive champion of the game.”





He concluded that he’s “totally solid” on his source, with Kotaku’s Ethan Gach corroborating some of the story. Moriarty goes on to admit even he was surprised by some of the numbers being thrown around here. “I was saying it cost nine figures probably, like low $100 million. But I thought there’s no way it cost $200 million. Actually, it cost $400 million – and that doesn’t even include the price of acquiring the team!”

Assuming all of this is accurate, then it’ll be interesting to see what this means for PlayStation moving forwards. We suspect Hulst will be under unfathomable pressure, as he’s the one leading the PS Studios charge and has allegedly cost his company hundreds of millions of dollars here. While he’s been promoted to co-CEO alongside hardware boss Hideaki Nishino, Concord falls under his remit – and we suspect he’s going to have a lot of explaining to do to his higher-ups.