Now that Concord has been offline for exactly two weeks today, looking back at it, it’s easy to surmise that it’s probably PlayStation’s biggest failure in its history. Though a new report puts into perspective just how big a failure it actually was.
According to former IGN journalist Colin Moriarty on his Sacred Symbols podcast, a member of Firewalk Studio’s development team reached out to him to share some internal details about what went on (and what went wrong) with Concord.
Perhaps the most shocking piece of news out of that conversation, is the claim that according to Moriarty’s source, Concord cost a whopping $400 million to make.
He goes on to describe how Concord got as far as it did and had as much money poured into it as it did because it was a game championed by leadership at PlayStation. Specifically the newly-minted joint-CEO Herman Hulst, who, according to Moriarty, looked at Concord as “his baby.”
He also says that according to his source, at least internally, Concord was looked at like a franchise that could be PlayStation’s “Star Wars” moment, and was called “the future of PlayStation.”
That then allegedly played into why Concord failed so spectacularly – no one was able to properly critique the game when it was what leadership wanted. Moriarty says it was described to him as having a ring of “toxic positivity” around it, where those in charge simply thought it could not fail because they believed in it, and their own abilities, so much.
Interestingly, Kotaku’s Ethan Gach who recently reported that Firewalk Studios remains “in limbo” while Sony decides what to do corroborated Moriarty’s reporting specifically around the “toxic positivity” claims. Gach goes further to say that some sources he spoke to said it stemmed from leadership coming from Bungie, where the common logic was that it would all magically come together in the end, with a “head in the sand mentality.”
Source – [Sacred Symbols, Kotaku]
