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Adam Boyes suggests the reported Concord budget numbers were fake...

You’re confused. I never said anyone is defending Concord. How can you defend something that launched and died within a few weeks 😆😆 Even Brink and Lawbreakers lasted longer than that. I’m talking about a few people who anytime it’s brought up, have to constantly try and remind us it wasn’t quite as bad of a bomb as people remember, and try to distract people from the fact that they predicted great things for the game.

Never implied it was a lot, I said a few. Two of them are in this thread. I don’t need to name them. To my point, we all know who they are.

Nobody is saying it didnt bomb as bad either depending on its budget. People are simply just speculating on the budget. I say people but it's mainly Men_in_Boxes Men_in_Boxes who seems obsessed with it. I don't know why. Who the hell cares right?
 
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Haint

Member
I watched a few minutes and he just makes a single off the cuff remark of "don't believe everything you read on the internet". Does he actually go into more details or is that the extent of the "debunking"? He's was gone half a decade before Covidflation, $4 Billion Bungie, and $200 million dollar DLC (Black Spiderman), so I question how good a grasp he has on modern Sony's spending.
 
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nocsi

Member
A lot of you are ignoring the very obvious. It's not a matter of DEI, burning money or having to buy a basket of turds that was Firewalk Studios. People keep talking about Concord, and that's completely missing the underlying bullshit that was executed. Just a reminder the entire studio was carved out of another company, which oftentimes you'd dump all the turd people into the package. No, the totality of everything is that this is all fraud and Sony got hardcore scammed. Here, let me get you all in the mood, look at the faces of the people that pulled this scam off on Sony:


u45XMpX.png


These aren't even the firewalk people, these are the ones that carved out the morsels of turds from their company, packaged it up with a bow and baited Sony to bite and buy their less than useless chattel. No wonder Sony was so quick to close down the entire studio. Anyways, I just want to leave off on this post with a simple thing... Wtf is a chief of HR? And why is this person held so such a high esteem to walk side by side with the CEO. If a company is valuing HR this much, then its probably a fuck around company.

If you guys didn't know, a lot of business around the Seattle area follows a trope that former Microsoft people starting their own company is going to turn out to be awesome -- so dive in and ask questions later. This has been true for countless companies, many of which you might not have realized had founders that were nurtured under Microsoft. The turds above also came from Microsoft, but they're a little different. For one, they look like they shower. You can't trust someone leaving Microsoft that's so well kept, that environment is a brutal warzone and if you had the ability to take care of yourself like that, then you're probably a time waster. Look at Gabe Newell, I don't like standing too close to him, but I'll always bet on him. Sony if you're reading this, I'm open to evaluating any and all future mergers/acquisitions you're thinking about. Otherwise I'll let you know what my process is - buy companies where the people are beatasses on the outside. I have way juicier stuff involving Firewalk and team HR above, but I'll hold off for another day. I'm actually neighbors with some of these goons
 

Three

Member
Lol.

Concord lost $400M.

Defenders: But it didn’t.

Ok, let’s say Concord lost $200M, had no gamers, shut down a studio, shut down the game in less than 2 weeks, auto refunded gamers and deleted the game.

Defenders: Uhhhhh…. Duhhhhh…. But at least it didn’t lose $400M!
Don't be silly. Even fanboys know it was a huge failure of a game. Bizarrely it's fanboys on the other side who care and constantly bring up concord. The $400M is their way of making it "the biggest failure ever, lol". Reality is that it didn't even show in PS' financials and they had a 12% growth that quarter. Not that how much they lost or their growth should be of any concern to most anyway but if people are going to be using those talking points for their fanboy fodder at least getting some actual facts about it would be nice.
 

Hookshot

Member
I wish it had succeeded, it still running would have given the Sony sad sacks of shit shills something else to do rather than clog up this site defending it every other post.
 

Life Diff

Member
This isn't actually about Concord. It's about charlatan Youtubers who use anonymous sources to peddle clickbait. Colin Moriarty burned the remainder of his goodwill up.
Ahh yes the clickbait Patreon - you got em bro. Not sure how Colin will sleep at night knowing box gone doesn’t support them anymore.
 

Mibu no ookami

Demoted Member® Pro™
More people talk about Concord than actually played it.

People cite the 400 million number despite it being obviously wrong because the higher the number the more reinforced their viewpoint is.

SIE is making record profits and many will try to suggest that this GaaS push somehow has sunk them, when the reality just isn't there. Where's the dip on their financials? Games have been getting canceled since games were being made, yet now if a game is canceled it's the end of the world.

To date the only major title that SIE has canceled in their GaaS push has been Factions. Will due respect to Bend Studios and Bluepoint, two studios that I really like, these are not the premier studios within PlayStation Studios and they're not even close.

Sony studios ranked

S Tier
Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Santa Monica

A Tier
Guerrilla Games, Sucker Punch

B Tier
Polyphony Digital, Media Molecule

C Tier
Bluepoint, Housemarque, San Diego, Team Asobi

D Tier
Bend, Firesprite

Rankings based on commercial success in the last 10 years, balanced with critical acclaim and consistency.

Definitions
S Tier - High likelihood of releasing a GOTY candidate AND a game to sell 15+ million copies
A Tier - moderate likelihood of releasing a GOTY candidate AND a game to sell 10+ million copies
B Tier - Games either have extremely high critical acclaim or have the likelihood of selling over 5 million copies
C Tier - Have not consistently put out games with both critical acclaim and high sales
D Tier - Haven't had consistent output, quality, or sales

This is a post I made in 2002 about the tiers of studios at SIE. I think I was wrong to put Polyphony Digital on the same tier as Media Molecule, but I digress (I can see where my thought process was but I should have separated B into two separate tiers.

Sony canceling a game from a C rank and a D rank studio is not the end of the world.

Obviously Asobi has cemented themselves into at least B Tier (according to this ranking system). Bungie is somewhere in that S/A Tier.
 

ungalo

Member
If i had to guess i'd say it's probably around 100 millions, perhaps even a little less. Yes there is a crazy budget inflation going on at Sony but it was still a new IP.
 

Mibu no ookami

Demoted Member® Pro™
What's sad is that I only see Concord being discussed on Gaf.

Sony rarely fails outright, so people like to bring it up to bludgeon Sony with it. Sony has had a pretty ridiculous track record of success, though I do see their mistakes starting to mount up. Since Rift Apart they seem more and more willing to release games before they're ready to release.

I think we ignore the impacts of the pandemic because the pandemic is over, but we have lasting damage from that in terms of delivery dates on titles. I can't think of a Sony title that didn't seem somewhat rushed other than maybe Demon's Souls and Astro Bot. I haven't played much Returnal though.

Sony's been really rough with Until Dawn, Spider-Man 2 PC, Lego Horizon... that's a string of bad results and I wonder how much their attitude is just that transmedia will resolve these long term.
 
Sony HALTED HIS WHOLE GAAS PUSH because of Concord. That's factual. You don't change your policies if there is no severe financial damage. For reference, before Concord, Sony canceled Factions (4 years of ND salaries) and the Spiderman multiplayer without correcting course. They only realized their mistakes after Concord.

So, obviously, Concord has been bigger than those 2 massive cancelations. So no, it's not "only"100M, enough with that damage control bullshit.
 

mdkirby

Gold Member
Eurgh, there’s lots of ways to play with the numbers, but at the end of the day they were def massive. Just knowing Sony AAA game budgets, plus the length of time it was in development and we know they used external dev teams on top. Marketing budgets are also massive often approaching the cost of dev, and concords was sizable, they even went to the effort of making custom controllers and commissioning an episode for amazons secret level. Last but not least SONY BOUGHT THE STUDIO at the height of the buy everyone frenzy and industry peak growth, where studios were consistently way over valued. We may never know how much they paid but it will have been in the hundreds of millions given we know the numbers for many other studio purchases around that time. They closed the studio so that’s a total loss along with the dev costs.
 

ungalo

Member
Sony HALTED HIS WHOLE GAAS PUSH because of Concord. That's factual. You don't change your policies if there is no severe financial damage. For reference, before Concord, Sony canceled Factions (4 years of ND salaries) and the Spiderman multiplayer without correcting course. They only realized their mistakes after Concord.

So, obviously, Concord has been bigger than those 2 massive cancelations. So no, it's not "only"100M, enough with that damage control bullshit.
The whole GAAS push is more than 100 millions, if they changed their policies it's probably because most of those games were not coming together. Concord added to the sense of urgency to not reproduce another failure.

That doesn't mean Concord is a 300 millions flop. 100 millions seems enough to scare Sony (not counting the studio's buyout).
 

Trilobit

Absolutely Cozy
I don't care to watch a whole video where they just ramble on. Does someone have a tdlr and sources of what they claim?
 
A lot of you are ignoring the very obvious. It's not a matter of DEI, burning money or having to buy a basket of turds that was Firewalk Studios. People keep talking about Concord, and that's completely missing the underlying bullshit that was executed. Just a reminder the entire studio was carved out of another company, which oftentimes you'd dump all the turd people into the package. No, the totality of everything is that this is all fraud and Sony got hardcore scammed. Here, let me get you all in the mood, look at the faces of the people that pulled this scam off on Sony:


u45XMpX.png


These aren't even the firewalk people, these are the ones that carved out the morsels of turds from their company, packaged it up with a bow and baited Sony to bite and buy their less than useless chattel. No wonder Sony was so quick to close down the entire studio. Anyways, I just want to leave off on this post with a simple thing... Wtf is a chief of HR? And why is this person held so such a high esteem to walk side by side with the CEO. If a company is valuing HR this much, then its probably a fuck around company.

If you guys didn't know, a lot of business around the Seattle area follows a trope that former Microsoft people starting thei



I said it a while ago. This company funded by ex-bungies is such a blatant scam that the fact that Sony swept it under the rug makes me extremely suspicious. If Sony doesn't sue it means that someone took money under the table. The same applies to the acquisition of the studio of Unknown 9 by Bandai Namco. That's another obvious scam.

I'm amazed not a single journalist is connecting the dots here.

The day Bungie explodes, 3 years max, we will know the truth about this bullshit and it's gonna be tasty.
 

Killjoy-NL

Member
The whole GAAS push is more than 100 millions, if they changed their policies it's probably because most of those games were not coming together. Concord added to the sense of urgency to not reproduce another failure.

That doesn't mean Concord is a 300 millions flop. 100 millions seems enough to scare Sony (not counting the studio's buyout).
Let's be honest, any fail will make any company stop and think.

The thing with Concord is mostly related to Woke and a shitload of Woke games that failed as well, like Suicide Squad and Dragon Age.

Society is changing rapidly, so obviously they have to reconsider some projects that likely have been worked on for some years.
 

SeanyQuest

Neo Member
This isn't actually about Concord. It's about charlatan Youtubers who use anonymous sources to peddle clickbait. Colin Moriarty burned the remainder of his goodwill up.
Lol what makes adam boyes right then? all he said was "not all numbers you see on the internet are real".
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
Defenders: Uhhhhh…. Duhhhhh…. But at least it didn’t lose $400M!

Objectively though; if $400m was earmarked for development/launch and 2 years worth of seasonal operation, and after a week and seeing how badly it was doing deciding to kill it dead with $200m spent... Then the people making the decision have just saved the company $200m !

The key thing people are ignoring from the bookmarked bit, is Boyes mentioning that projects get canned all the time, often after significant time and money has been invested. Just because such thing aren't as publicly visible and well known, it doesn't mean the loss is less!
 

Saber

Member
Fighting a rumor with a rumor is as much stupid as believing Concord fail because of fabricated hate and not on its own merits.
 

DryvBy

Member
Yup.

Playstation continued increasing operating income in a period when Concord flopped and they didn't have too many major releases, either.

Concord's supposed $400M failure (completely fabricated from misinterpretation of VC funding for multiple projects) wasn't even a blip on the radar. It was a non-event loss. Yet people claiming it's the biggest videogame failure of all time. It may be one of the most embarrassing failure of all time being pulled from the market immediately, but in terms of losses it's nowhere close.
It was the biggest flop ever. It flopped so hard, the game was a penny within a month. It shut down within a month. The entire thing is a giant flop. Its ok to dog out and humiliate Sony over this too because then you'll never get this crap again.
 
Let's country the bodies:
MS releases all their games on other consoles (including back catalog)
MS barely sells any consoles
Phil is making excuses
Etc.

Sony and Nintendo are just chugging along, selling boat loads of consoles, making games for them, etc.

I don't know if the others win, but MS definitely lost.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
Who cares the game was the biggest flop in decades. Biggest shame a company could have. Anyone accosted wit it should feel bad.
 
The source on the numbers is a former dev who reached out and told Colin what was happening with the game. The dude has an axe to grind clearly, so I’m sure that $400m was involved, but how one arrives at that number is tricky math.

Nobody can come up with the number because we all have different definitions of what should constitute the “budget”.

At the end of the day though the budget doesn’t really matter. It was a giga flop.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Don't be silly. Even fanboys know it was a huge failure of a game. Bizarrely it's fanboys on the other side who care and constantly bring up concord. The $400M is their way of making it "the biggest failure ever, lol". Reality is that it didn't even show in PS' financials and they had a 12% growth that quarter. Not that how much they lost or their growth should be of any concern to most anyway but if people are going to be using those talking points for their fanboy fodder at least getting some actual facts about it would be nice.

Yes, how dare people talk about Concord in a topic about Concord made by notorious fanboy from the other side Men_in_Boxes Men_in_Boxes 🤭


So it lost more that that?!

Possibly.

Irrespective of Colin's $400m statement, it was already a big budget game ($200M) that needed more money to finish it and the amount the studio was acquired for has not been publicly revealed.

The initial development deal for the game was just over $200 million, according to two sources familiar with the agreement but who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. But Kotaku understands that amount was not enough to cover the game’s entire development and did not include the purchase of Concord IP rights or Firewalk Studios itself, which Sony acquired only last year.

 

Three

Member
Yes, how dare people talk about Concord in a topic about Concord made by notorious fanboy from the other side Men_in_Boxes Men_in_Boxes 🤭
Men in boxes is a GaaS fanboy and if anything the $400M comes from a PS fan. I'm talking about people bringing it up outside of this topic though, about how much they've wasted on it in other threads. I'm not saying people shouldn't discuss Concords budget in a concord budget thread, where are you getting that nonsense from?
 
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Bojji

Member
Yes, how dare people talk about Concord in a topic about Concord made by notorious fanboy from the other side Men_in_Boxes Men_in_Boxes 🤭




Possibly.

Irrespective of Colin's $400m statement, it was already a big budget game ($200M) that needed more money to finish it and the amount the studio was acquired for has not been publicly revealed.




In reality no matter if Concord lost 200, 300, 400 or more millions of dollars it was one of the most hilarious flops of all time. It also caused to Sony to cancel more GaaS games that costed them many, many more millions for development (+ lost years and potential sales of SP games that could be developed by these studios).

Comments in this thread that it was "nothing" or like "fart in the wind" are hilarious. Concord fail was massive and changed Sony strategy and plans for next few years.
 
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adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
where are you getting that nonsense from?

From your post whinging about people talking of Concord's budget .... while being in a topic made specifically about Concord's budget. 🤷‍♂️

If you have a problem with people talking about it in unrelated topics, bring it up there.

In reality no matter if Concord lost 200, 300, 400 or more millions of dollars it was one of the most hilarious flops of all time. It also caused to Sony to cancel more GaaS games that costed them many, many more millions for development (+ lost years and potential sales of SP games that could be developed by these studios).

One can gussy up Sony's earnings results as a whole while talking about this game's impact. It shut down a pricey (?) acquisition and made them pivot their entire development pipeline for the foreseeable future.

If Sony wasn't a financially successful company already, this is probably the kind of thing that shuts down a Sega Dreamcast caliber venture.
 
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Three

Member
From your post whinging about people talking of Concord's budget .... while being in a topic made specifically about Concord's budget. 🤷‍♂️
I wasn't the one who was whinging about the thread. It was the person I replied to whinging about the threads existence genius. I was merely saying if people are going to be using it as fanboy fodder it's good to at least have some facts regarding the matter.
 

Saber

Member
In reality no matter if Concord lost 200, 300, 400 or more millions of dollars it was one of the most hilarious flops of all time. It also caused to Sony to cancel more GaaS games that costed them many, many more millions for development (+ lost years and potential sales of SP games that could be developed by these studios).

Comments in this thread that it was "nothing" or like "fart in the wind" are hilarious. Concord fail was massive and changed Sony strategy and plans for next few years.

Agree, might be the dumbest take of all. The only ones who should actually be interested on this are wikipedians/historians, as they would do need to know and report about the accuracy of the numbers(at least in practice).
People here have nothing to gain or proof with number accuracy here, the project was cancelled and the game receive global rejection. This is a huge fail to the point of them starting to cut some projects and people, real numbers will not change that.
 
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Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
The initial development deal for the game was just over $200 million, according to two sources familiar with the agreement but who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. But Kotaku understands that amount was not enough to cover the game’s entire development and did not include the purchase of Concord IP rights or Firewalk Studios itself, which Sony acquired only last year.

Problem is this statement makes no sense. Initial development deal for $200m, OK. But that'sa lot of money for... what exactly?

The only thing this could possibly be is for a development budget over x number of years, including marketing, publishing, outsourcing etc. So basically its money earmarked for the project, but not necessarily spent as being a service game expenditure continues potentially for years after launch.

So essentially that number may be inflated already.

Next, the claim of allegedly another 200m for IP rights and the Studio, which I find extraordinarily hard to believe. If a publishing agreement didn't already exist then Sony wouldn't be funding the entire dev budget. So subtract that. Next "buying a studio" is about IP, because you can't buy the staff because they are employees not slaves, and the infrastructure (building/running costs etc.) is most likely just leased anyway... And if they only bought them last year, then its precisely one year's worth of those costs needing to be covered...

So all this second payment can be really is for permanent IP ownership of an unpublished title that they already have exclusive rights to.... Which doesn't sound like its close to being worth hundreds of millions of dollars, when its value is still completely hypothetical.

Sorry guys. But this seems like utter horseshit to me. There's no way $400m could have been spent, it just doesn't add up.
 

Three

Member
Agree, might be the dumbest take of all. The only ones who should actually be interested on this are wikipedians/historians, as they would do need to know and report about the accuracy of the numbers(at least in practice).
People here have nothing to gain or proof with number accuracy here, the project was cancelled and the game receive global rejection. This is s huge fail to the point of them starting to cut some projects and people, real numbers will not change that.
It's mostly driven by people who are trying to make it "the biggest flop in the entertainment industry". Most people shouldn't and don't care though.
 

Three

Member
Tell that to ya boy Men_in_Boxes Men_in_Boxes who made this topic completely unprompted. He doesn't want people to forget about gaming's hindenburg.
He made this topic because he's a GaaS fanboy slash business model pusher, and because there was a very recent interview with Adam Boyes disputing the Colin claim. "Completely unprompted", I've seen you create threads with far less. What exactly do you want me to tell him? I'm not the one saying this thread shouldn't exist so what do you want me to tell "ma boy". I'm saying some facts would be nice for the historians and those other fanboys trying to push that angle but you're too caught up in wars to understand that.
 
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