miklonus
Member
People think because Colin's said something nice about Sony before that Colin blindly sucks Sony's dick like they do.
It shows he's not a fuckin' shill, if anything.
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Colin Moriarty doubles down on his 400 million claim...
- Thread starter Men_in_Boxes
- Start date
It shows he's not a fuckin' shill, if anything.
miklonus
Member
The fuck?
This threads exists because THIS guy made it?
.
StueyDuck
Member
So has anyone in media yet with all this knowledge and insider sources yet come with counter cost yet?
Everyone seems to know what it isn't but are clueless with what it is.
Weenie boy schreier got a number yet? or Christopher dring? Tom Warrens numbers? do we have anything at all from any of these people?
Everyone seems to know what it isn't but are clueless with what it is.
Weenie boy schreier got a number yet? or Christopher dring? Tom Warrens numbers? do we have anything at all from any of these people?
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mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
This is very HORRIBLE logic. How could Concord cost $400 Million, but Spiderman 2 cost $300 Million? Have you really really thought about this?
balls of snow
Member
I supposed they added in the cost of the studio as well when Sony bought them.
Heisenberg007
Gold Journalism
Apparently, he hasn't.
I haven't watched any of these videos but saw some people talking that the cost of studio acquisition isn't involved in this $400M figure, which makes this whole thing even more bizarre.
Heisenberg007
Gold Journalism
The counter cost will only come by (1) educated guesses or (2) access to financial documents.
The first one is as useless as Colin's claim. The second one is something that hardly anyone would have access to.
Just a reminder: even Colin hasn't come up with hard evidence either. His entire claimed is based on talking to ONE person that he knows. This is why it doesn't make sense to believe Colin on this one.
If you hear something from one source, integrity demands that you double-check with multiple other sources. Colin didn't do any of that and just said what he heard. According to him "his source is Ironclad." So it's literally "trust me bro" at this stage.
Not saying that Colin is lying. But isn't there a teeny tiny possibility that that ONE person he talked to had (1) a personal grudge against Firewalk / Sony, (2) was probably fired and wanted to spread misinformation, (3) was intentionally lying for whatever reason, (4) is honest but had incorrect information?
There is a myriad of reasons why this is so stupid. Not to mention the fact that it defies all logic in the first place.
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pasterpl
Member
Didn’t they reuse lots of assets from previous games, probably same with some animations, sounds etc. That’s a lot of saving compared to developing something from zero in a brand new studio.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Have you seen Spiderman 2 compared to Concord? Just watch a few videos of Concord on Youtube and you let me know if you think there's more assets in it than Spiderman 2.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Gaas mtx temptation too much.
They looked at all the CODs and Fortnite’s and even their own grand fate order game and wanted in.
They could had used all those resources and make some more rock solid SP focused games and let third parties handle the MP and gaas games. Just sit back and collect the 30% cuts. Even their bad ones (if you can even call it that) is days gone which sold 8 million copies. That’s probably their lowest selling high budget game. Their other ones like gow, Spider-Man etc… all sell probably 15M+ copies.
The odd thing is it’s not like they tested it out slowly. They went all in fast. Helldivers 2, Bungie, haven, firewalk, deviation games, factions 2 at some point until cancellation. MYbe some more we don’t know about. All shooter gaas games. And if their original gaas roadmap from 2022 was on schedule, all these games would had been out by 2025 like one giant shooter mosh pit. Crazy.
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Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
Had a chance to fully go through and watch Colin's arguments. He makes a number of claims to back up his defense of the $400M figure, and doesn't blame people for doubting him, but then simultaneously states "they just haven't connected the dots like I have". And unfortunately for Colin, the dots he's connecting do not logically add up. Instead of connecting the dots, he's jumping to conclusions, and I knew that the vast majority of his defense of the $400M estimate comes from the initial claims of Series A VC funding for ProbablyMonsters at $250M in 2022. Note: ProbablyMonsters confirms on their website that their studio headcounts grew 65% in 2022.
1. Flaw #1 - Assuming $250M VC funding, closed in 2022, suddenly means that's money that has already been spent.
This is simply capturing private funding to deploy over the course of many years. It does not mean that money has been spent. It has a plan based on the number of studios and incubation projects. Indeed, we can see that from ProbablyMonster's own website they had multiple projects on their roadmap, some of which have been closed (money spent already), but others that were retained. It is a wildly inaccurate accusation that the $250M funding in 2022 was suddenly all mostly accounted for by 2023 when Sony picked up the project. This is long-term investment capital used to bring multiple ProbablyMonsters projects into fruition over the course of 5-10+ years.
Colin also has a habit of making wild claims about compensation. I've heard him make claims in the past about how much some employees at bungie are making at a lead level, and it is wildly out of touch (claiming they stand to make millions upon millions in the acquisition which is just false). The truth is that almost all of the acquisition cost goes to the very tippy top of the organization that has sizable shares. The vast majority do not. Those more involved in the actual game operations do not. In today's video, he claimed that FireWalk had to hire expensive employees, and while this is true, in context of the overall budget you are only talking about a handful of people. And most of their compensation is in the form of stock, as it's a new company and presumably the reason they are starting a new company is to enjoy in that growth moreso than the cash based compensation.
2. Flaw #2 - Assuming most of that $250M VC funding (that wasn't already spent) was largely allocated to Concord.
Pretty self explanatory based on the discussion above. Why would Concord consume the vast majority of their intended VC funding in just the span of a single year, when they were just going to flip FireWalk to Sony? While it was a difficult year and they may have sold FireWalk to Sony as a result of being concerned about long-term cash positions, it makes no sense to sell what you presume to be your golden goose projects and only have a skeleton crew working them. No, it seems to me based upon FireWalk's headcount vs ProbabyMonsters headcount that while the FireWalk divestiture was significant, it was not representative of the majority of the $250M in funding they were accounting for in their FUTURE roadmap.
3. Flaw #3 - Arguing that because Spiderman 2 cost over $300M, that "videogame development is just that expensive these days".
True, game development costs have ballooned over the years. But Spider-Man's costs are out there in public for all to see, and they are quite detailed.
Insomniac is located in probably the most expensive part of the country, even higher than Bellevue Washington according to online CoL estimates. Spider-Man 2 had a headcount of over 300 people on average working on the project on a full-time basis for around 3 years. This ended up costing $245M in direct studio related costs, and $54M in "Outsourcing Costs". Outsourcing, which was significant on SM2, was roughly 18% of the spend. Note: Spider-Man has much larger "credits" than Concord. $245M allocated to 300 people (on average) over 3 years is roughly $272,000 per employee (includes all overhead costs, see Insomniac's detailed breakdown)
Probably Monsters, at its peak, was nowhere NEAR the peak of Insomniac Games at 380 direct employees working on Spider-Man 2. Estimates of FireWalk Studios was roughly 160, and we know that the studio size for ProbablyMonsters grew 65% in 2022. While we can't exactly know how much of that was for FireWalk directly, let's just assume that a dozen employees in 2019 gradually ramped up to a peak of 160 in 2022, and do some rough math.
2019 = 12 x $272,000 = $3.2M
2020 = 50 x $272,000 = $13.6M
2021 = 100 x $272,000 = $27.2M
2022 = 165 x $272,000 = $44.8M (headcount grew 65%)
2023 = 165 x $272,000 = $44.8M
2024 = 165 x $272,000/2 (only worked half the year) =$22.4M
Total Direct Studio Costs: $156M. Assuming outsourcing costs of 20%, similar to Insomniac, that brings the total to $187M
NOTE: I believe this estimate is at the EXTREMELY HIGH END for two main reasons, and a third one that is just more of a hunch:
1) Insomniac games has a VERY GENEROUS profit sharing structure for its employees based on the massive success they had with Spider-Man 1. It essentially shakes out to a roughly 25-33% bonus depending on the year. FireWalk studio is an unproven start-up company. At a start-up, you forego cash based or profit based compensation because that does not exist, in exchange for share ownership in the company itself. So the $272,000 average cost per employee is likely overstated massively for a start up studio in a less expensive part of the country compared to one of the most successful studios in the world in likely the most expensive place in the world to develop.
2) The employee headcount of 165 is around their peak, just like 380 was for Spider-Man 2 in the last stages of development. I had a full 2.5 years where I assumed that 165 employees were working at FireWalk, which represents a massive overestimate.
3) Spider-Man is a very large project where a significant amount of work was outsourced. It stands to reason to me that outsourcing costs would likely be higher for a game with much more on the line to support a much higher project complexity and far more visual production values that Sony is known to support. This point is arguable and not really provable in either way.
Bottom line: Any way you shake it, you cannot get to $400M. It's extremely implausible by more than a factor of 2X.
One of the finest replies in NeoGAF history.
James Sawyer Ford
is an asset to the NeoGAF community.
Katatonic
Member
Meh, more of an opportunist than genuine PS guy.
KimDongHwan
Member
Same!, like why would some people even go to say "he" is lying, its ok if he is wrong (as in took the wrong conclusion) or that the source was lying or wrong, but why would some people go and call him out as the liar without any proof at all. That sounds like witch hunt to me.
hououinkyouma00
Member
How is Colin not a genuine PS guy?
Katatonic
Member
Devil's in the details.
Edit: Not that I think there is such a thing as a "genuine X guy" or whatever as this is just a money maker for them. My post was in the context to the post I was responding to.
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hououinkyouma00
Member
I mean I've listened to the dude since he shortly after he joined Podcast Beyond. There are few people who know about and play as much PlayStation as he has and does. He literally only plays on PlayStation (I think the last time I remember him saying he played anywhere else was Halo for Knockback and maybe Civ?).
I can think of anybody as PlayStation centric people as big as him besides maybe Mystic but Mystic owns everything.
CLW
Member
Dragon Age veteran crunches the numbers on Concord's reported $400 million cost: "A project that is in trouble can get really big in an effort to get it over the finish line"
"Did it cost 400 million dollars? I'm not sure, I think we can make it plausible that it did"
Dragon Age developer says it is “plausible” $400M
#ColinIsRight?
sharp weiner
Member
*Colins source is right?
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ChorizoPicozo
Gold Member
Why do you think sony is not saying anything?!?!?!
James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
My post shows it’s not possible because FireWalk only had 165 peak employees
Yes, outsourcing at the end contributes, but even if we assume outsourcing was an additional 50% on top of studio costs (an extremely high factor), that only gets you to $240M or so worst case. Insomniac’s outsourcing costs were around 20%
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mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Dragon Age veteran crunches the numbers on Concord's reported $400 million cost: "A project that is in trouble can get really big in an effort to get it over the finish line"
"Did it cost 400 million dollars? I'm not sure, I think we can make it plausible that it did"www.gamesradar.com
Dragon Age developer says it is “plausible” $400M
#ColinIsRight?
Plausible how? Which EA game has cost $400 million in history?
Omnipunctual Godot
Gold Member
Especially considering he thought his initial assumption of $200M was too much before hearing from the source.
James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
He gets attention. And he got a lot of it. He is in the business of getting attention
CLW
Member
I see so because ONE game has only 165 employees “the future of PlayStation” couldn’t have gone full on stupid and somehow got an asinine number of “workers” hell I’m betting this studio hired ANYONE that claimed an oppression Olympics medal
I think this argument on just how BIG was the biggest flop in gaming is pretty stupid but a game dev has now said it’s “plausible” and NOONE truly knows the actual to the penny cost other than some BIGTIME higher ups at Sony and they might not know the total damage yet
James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
“Future of PlayStation” has no meaning, it’s a phrase given to Colin by someone that was an insider (allegedly), but it has no bearing on how much budget they allocated to this game.
I can understand that Sony certainly believed this could be a centerpiece to their GaaS strategy, which is a key future pillar according to PlayStation leadership, and by all means the $150-200M budget that I estimated it cost based on actual historical data is a significant amount of money already, especially for a live service game and not some huge AAA 40+ hour single player title
So yes, the financial commitment was already significant; no need to irrationally inflate that to hyperbolically comical levels
proandrad
Member
Elon fired like 5,000 people from twitter and it kept working just fine. Tech companies love to hire people for useless positions that aren't needed.
Owh so now we shouldnt listen to devs in the industry but to a random unsourced unverified random forum poster such as you?
DrFigs
Member
I think they want people to forget about Concord.
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
James Sawyer Ford
Gold Member
Not to toot my horn, but I've laid out a far better analysis of the historical facts and actual costs of development regarding this situation than Colin, whose 35+ minute rant argument boils down to a misunderstanding of VC capital raising, and "trust me bro". Very superficial discussion without any significant details that justify the claim being made.
We're all still waiting on that Bloodborne remake he's been talking about for years as well....
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Dr. Wilkinson
Member
He doesn’t need more attention. Do you know how big that guy’s audience is now? That’s not a very persuasive argument. He didn’t get his audience by shitting out blatant lies. People like him because he’s thoughtful and has a different view than most in the media.
To risk all that by making something up really doesn’t sound like what’s happening here.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
He was giving bad information. It's simple as that.