GVMERS: The $400,000,000 Disaster of Concord

DonkeyPunchJr said:
Oh is this one of those videos where they try really hard not to say "woke", "DEI", "ugly", or anything like it? (I won't be able to watch til after work)
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GVMERS doesn't in any of their videos, they put these out like made-for-TV documentaries. It's pretty good. Lots of stuff folks here already know cause we've been bombarded with it in real time .. but yaknow.
 
diffusionx said:
Nobody defends Sony for this stuff here
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JSF tried really hard to downplay it, that this was all just part of Sony's plan for some of their GaaS attempts to fail.

Men in Boxes told me that Team Fortress 2 also had terrible character designs yet it succeeded, therefore Concord's character designs weren't the cause of its failure. Honestly no idea what point he was trying to make with that one.
 
DonkeyPunchJr said:
JSF tried really hard to downplay it, that this was all just part of Sony's plan for some of their GaaS attempts to fail.

Men in Boxes told me that Team Fortress 2 also had terrible character designs yet it succeeded, therefore Concord's character designs weren't the cause of its failure. Honestly no idea what point he was trying to make with that one.
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MiB was a silly one, TF2 designs weren't terrible like Concord. It has also been F2P since release and was an anticipated sequel the first game which was popular.

Concord has all the hideous shite that people are tired of and pushing back on.
 
adamsapple said:
​



Successful live-service games generate lucrative and recurring revenue streams, courtesy of microtransactions and battle pass sales. Blizzard Entertainment set the standard in many respects considering the way it supported the original Overwatch, which accrued an astounding $1 billion in revenue and 30 million registered users in its first year of availability. Game publishers across the industry quickly jumped at the chance to get a piece of the pie, some pursuing the service trend to great success while others crashed and burned. The gold rush has long held merit given the number of console players who devote playtime to such experiences on a monthly basis. And as a console manufacturer, Sony may have felt doubly incentivized to dip its toes in the same water.

After becoming a dominant force in the single-player games space throughout the PlayStation 4 era, Sony Interactive Entertainment started investing more into multiplayer endeavors around the launch of the PS5. It notably took an interest in Concord, a hero shooter spooled up under the watchful eye of industry veterans who'd previously worked at Activision, Bungie, and BioWare. However, not even this level of expertise could guarantee success.

Concord developer Firewalk Studios built a solid foundation in terms of gameplay, yet critics and players balked at the visual design choices and the boldness of the game's premium price tag. In a world where Overwatch 2 launched as a free-to-play experience to an already established fanbase, the likes of the Firewalk endeavor could only afford so many missteps. After all, multiplayer audiences have a finite amount of time and money, commodities that needn't be wasted on experiences incapable of attracting and maintaining their attention. Concord failed on both counts and then some, which its creators paid for dearly.

This is the tragedy of Concord.
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Fake news, Concord couldn't cost $400M. But as happens in non-GaaS games yes, some fail and some are a success because nobody has a crystal ball. So for that reason instead of investing in just one they invest on a batch of them, to ensure a portion of them will be successful and with their profits will more than cover the failed ones.

In this case, the already existing (and future) profits from the successful Sony GaaS like MLB, Gran Turismo, Destiny or Helldivers more than compensate whatever Concord plus the other failed/cancelled/not greenlighted GaaS did cost. Meaning, Sony will continue their related plans.

And well, Overwatch didn't provide anything new or special to GaaS, mobile and PC GaaS already were huge many years before Overwatch released. Even Blizzard had a bigger GaaS success before with World of Warcraft. In a smaller scale, before Overwatch Sony already had success with GaaS in Little Big Planet, PS Home or the SOE stuff.
 
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EN250 said:
Sony defense force in 3...2...1...

nothing-to-see-here-explosion.gif
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Too Late Run GIF by PeacockTV


Plus the comment section never fail to make me laugh :)

iNsR5fk.png
 
Imtjnotu said:
A team that small had more than double the budget of other sony first party games?

SM2 was 300 million

The last of us 2 was 200 million.
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I think most estimates include the acquisition cost for the studio in that tally as well. SM2 or TLoU 2's budgets wouldn't need that, but you can still see that without those how high these first party budgets are.

$300 million without any acquisition or procurement overhead is still insanely high.
 
adamsapple said:
I think most estimates include the acquisition cost for the studio in that tally as well. SM2 or TLoU 2's budgets wouldn't need that, but you can still see that without those how high these first party budgets are.

$300 million without any acquisition or procurement overhead is still insanely high.
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They also built a new headquarters for Firewalk
 
Imtjnotu said:
A team that small had more than double the budget of other sony first party games?

SM2 was 300 million

The last of us 2 was 200 million.
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Yeah I don't know but I personally am not comparing the machines of Insomniac and ND who knows what they are doing making games (sequels at that) to this Firewalk studio building new shit and Sony having to buy them

400 doesn't shock me in the least
 
Imtjnotu said:
A team that small had more than double the budget of other sony first party games?

SM2 was 300 million

The last of us 2 was 200 million.
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Spider Man 2 honestly should have been much lower. Not even Insomniac seems to understand how they got to that number, and they're incredibly efficient, and its a direct sequel built on most of what they had in the 1st game.

HeisenbergFX4 said:
Yeah I don't know but I personally am not comparing the machines of Insomniac and ND who knows what they are doing making games (sequels at that) to this Firewalk studio building new shit and Sony having to buy them

400 doesn't shock me in the least
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Read my mind.
 
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HeisenbergFX4 said:
All for getting a different number that's been reported on by someone fairly reputable and James doesn't fit that
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We know the size of the team, the years it took to be developed, and that an important portion of them a smaller than usual.

These numbers are smaller than AAA Sony games that had a budget of $200M+, games that also must had a bigger marketing because of being sequels of top seller games from stablished top devs.

Pretty likely the budget of Concord including marketing was somewhere between $150-200M. The $400M is simply fantasy.

That "fairly reputable one" also mentioned that Sony had cancelled the paid ads of Marathon but a week or two later we saw Marathon featured in a PS5 sizzle tv ad, the UEFA Champions League finals and the Summer Game Fest hype trailer.
 
yurinka said:
We know the size of the team, the years it took to be developed, and that an important portion of them a smaller than usual.

These numbers are smaller than AAA Sony games that had a budget of $200M+, games that also must had a bigger marketing because of being sequels of top seller games from stablished top devs.

Pretty likely the budget of Concord including marketing was somewhere between $150-200M. The $400M is simply fantasy.

That "fairly reputable one" also mentioned that Sony had cancelled the paid ads of Marathon but a week or two later we saw Marathon featured in a PS5 sizzle tv ad, the UEFA Champions League finals and the Summer Game Fest hype trailer.
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So we are making up numbers of "pretty likely"

In all fairness pretty sure he only stated marketing was canceled in key overseas markets but the internet just grabbed canceled as it was a better click getter

Its cool people believe whatever they want to believe, I have heard other places that number was accurate and I mean when everything was tallied up, not just the games budget
 
Kacho said:
Yes. They never mention anything remotely controversial similar to Matt McMuscles. They skim over or ignore inconvenient things (like Volition's awful PR having a negative impact on Saints Row.)
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With Matt McMuscles, he's been cucked out, like most people up there in Montreal, for well over a decade. I think it's part of why The Best Friends ended, but I have no proof of that. Folks in Montreal just live in their own headspace, kinda like the folks in Seattle, and that's exactly why this game failed. I speak from experience as a former Seattle resident for 12 years by the way; they are so fucking terrified to ever be associated with what they consider "problematic" that they never even speak their mind, and they honestly don't even have their own world views at all. It's something that happens when you live there for a while, you either fall in line to the narrative or you keep your mouth shut. Me? I kept my mouth shut, right up until everything went truly insane around 2020-ish, and then I got the fuck out while the getting was good, (and my property value netted me a small fortune lol), and I'm so much happier out here on the East Coast. Still a lot of goofy bastards out here too, but at least I can speak my piece and not fear being ostracized, and that fear of being ostracized is exactly what so many team members must have felt while working on this game. Can't say anything though, or you're essentially blacklisted in the Seattle game industry.

That's toxic positivity in a nutshell folks and it's eerilly similar to how the Germans were acting about a hundred years ago, which is odd, sure, but there's probably nothing to be concerned about there......right?

Right?.....
 
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literally all they have to do is replace all the characters with milkmaid waifus and make it free to play and they'll recoup everything

almost as baffling as shelving a completed last of us multiplayer game
 
HeisenbergFX4 said:
So we are making up numbers of "pretty likely"

In all fairness pretty sure he only stated marketing was canceled in key overseas markets but the internet just grabbed canceled as it was a better click getter

Its cool people believe whatever they want to believe, I have heard other places that number was accurate and I mean when everything was tallied up, not just the games budget
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Yes, the $400M are totally made up.

The somewhat similar AAA cases in the industry we can compare lead us to think that very likely it's somewhere in that $150-$200M range.

Maybe you can maybe increase the delta and say maybe $100-250M range, but to go from that to $400M is nonsensical.
 
I put a few hours into Concord on PC while it lasted. It was dogshit but I wanted to be part of history - now I have six entire Concord trophies forever on my PS account.

Besides all the obvious, one of the funniest things about the game that doesn't get mentioned as often is the dogshit optimization. My PC at the time was well over the recommended specs but the game's CPU performance was so terrible I couldn't even maintain a solid 60 fps. Let alone the fact that PC standards for competitive FPS titles are way, way higher than 60 fps, and even a lot of the popular shooters on consoles have 120 Hz modes. Yet another sign these retards had no idea what they were doing.

It was really funny watching John Linneman get 80-90 fps on a 12700K and praising the game's optimization. Clueless.
 
yurinka said:
Yes, the $400M are totally made up.

The somewhat similar AAA cases in the industry we can compare lead us to think that very likely it's somewhere in that $150-$200M range.

Maybe you can maybe increase the delta and say maybe $100-250M range, but to go from that to $400M is nonsensical.
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Whatever number you "likely" feel good at, its ok with me, honestly
 
Dacvak said:
This'll be an interesting watch. I really hope companies take Concord as a cautionary tale and executives stop demanding live service game development from their studios.
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Unironically, Concord and Marathon may be the games that save the gaming industry from somber future.
 
yurinka said:
Yes, the $400M are totally made up.

The somewhat similar AAA cases in the industry we can compare lead us to think that very likely it's somewhere in that $150-$200M range.

Maybe you can maybe increase the delta and say maybe $100-250M range, but to go from that to $400M is nonsensical.
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They bought the company - that incurs a lot of costs, and closed the studio - again a lot of cost.
While they were still reporting separately - Activision who are normally very profitable, had a net loss of close to a billion dollars for MS due to costs associated with the deal.
$400 million is probably a low ball for how much Concord effectively cost Sony.
 
400 million
Or the other 100 to 150million wasted

How the fuck you waste 150 million?
 
Nydius said:
Beat me to it. This was immediately what I thought when I saw the thread title.

Need James to come back with his full throated defense of why all these numbers are "wrong" because he says so. 🤣



The likelihood that people would have bothered playing it is minuscule. Certainly not worth the cost of maintaining the servers or even a skeleton crew to keep them going. Without some kind of monetization plan in place, keeping it going would have been the epitome of the adage "throwing good money after bad".

Shutting it down was the only financially reasonable thing to do.
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As opposed to it's 400 million because Colin said so
 
Concord could have survived and done relatively well. Sony had no idea how to launch a game like that. They also appeared to not have learned anything with how they tried to roll out Marathon. Let's hope they learn from that and hire someone to manage their live service releases.
 
Without even clicking, I can tell you that there's probably someone on Resetera crying about the existence of this video and asking to ban this Youtube channel from their forum.
 
Punished Miku said:
I think Sony could manage. Sometimes these games grow a bit over time. They didn't even try. Just weird.
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The accountants did the math and calculated the tax write-off value was greater than any possible return made by just keeping the game out there, given the rumoured development cost, the tax-write off is likely enough to fund another game that hopefully isn't GaaS.
 
poppabk said:
They bought the company - that incurs a lot of costs, and closed the studio - again a lot of cost.
While they were still reporting separately - Activision who are normally very profitable, had a net loss of close to a billion dollars for MS due to costs associated with the deal.
$400 million is probably a low ball for how much Concord effectively cost Sony.
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According to the 'leaker' the $400M was just the game budget, didn't include the acquisition or post launch support.

ArtHands said:
concord deserves another chance tbh. A remake or some sort
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Nah, deserves to continue buried and as something Sony has to learn from: focusing on political propaganda over game quality and ignoring players leads to big failure.

MLB, GT, Destiny, Helldivers 2 and Marvel Tokon plus pretty likely a few other GaaS more ( as could be Marathon too after a maybe softer than expected/rocky launch) will be huge successes.

Sony should focus on the successful ones and leave the failures buried making sure they don't repeat the mistakes.
 
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DeepEnigma said:
MiB was a silly one, TF2 designs weren't terrible like Concord. It has also been F2P since release and was an anticipated sequel the first game which was popular.

Concord has all the hideous shite that people are tired of and pushing back on.
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TF2 went F2P in 2011, 4 years after its original release.

It was part of Orange Box or costed 20 bucks alone.
 
I can't wait for the complete, behind the scenes dissection of what went on behind the scenes for concord.

I still believe there's so much more to the story, was the game always going to be a hero shooter, how bad the professor really was and so on.

The game still is such a colossal disaster i just can't see how it's not a good story to tell. maybe 20 years from now in a netflix style documentary or something
 
This game looked like some kind of psyop honestly. There must be more to it, I mean, look at those characters.
 
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Punished Miku said:
The worst thing they did was just shut it off. Could literally still drop it on PS+ if they wanted and let people play it. Some people bought physical copies and controllers. Just an absurd reaction honestly.
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Would of cost more to keep it running I imagine, just throwing money down a hole.
 
Negotiator101 said:
Would have cost more to keep it running I imagine, just throwing money down a hole.
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I honestly kinda wish they kept throwing good money after bad and keeping it on life support for the ~100 dedicated fans. Just imagine the Pride Month skins we would be getting right now:
MyAYsCn.jpeg

So much potential wasted
 
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