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[Gamerguy84]

It's not their money. What they celebrating? how much Sony lost or what.

These are lessons for them. Go back to what made you great, start with Wolverine.

Quit killing people like Joel, quit making SM a diversity character, get away from all the DEI shit and GAAS. Go make some more recognizable mainstream games because your good at that. I know you gotta change with the times but ill quote "evolution not revolution "

 

[Killjoy-NL]

Still going on about Concord?

 

[StreetsofBeige]

It's not their money. What they celebrating? how much Sony lost or what.

These are lessons for them. Go back to what made you great, start with Wolverine.

Quit killing people like Joel, quit making SM a diversity character, get away from all the DEI shit and GAAS. Go make some more recognizable mainstream games because your good at that. I know you gotta change with the times but ill quote "evolution not revolution "

All Sony had to do is keep doing what they are doing since LOU1 hit pay dirt in PS3 generation games like UC and LOU to go with legacy GOW. Keep making baseball and GT which are that have been around since PS1 days. And focus on SP games. PS4 had tons of new SP IPs that sold a ton.... Spidey, DG, Ghost, Horizon. Add in MP mode if needed, but focus on the core SP part first.

Just sit back, sell tons of SP copies, collect third party 30% cuts and coast. Problem is they got greedy.

They probably got sick of all the third party companies like Epic and Activision bragging about MTX galore. Like any pure software based tech company, once they get successful, they rake in tons of profits with abnormally high margins. Traditional companies like Sony who have hardware (or any company with lots of physical sales) will rarely have profit margins like a software company which is all employees, servers and digital downloads. They dont have to worry about much about inventory, warehousing or factories cranking out widgets to fill fleet trucks.

So they did a hard 180 and focused so much on GAAS, at one point one of those old 2022 PPT slides said I think they wanted 12 GAAS games by 2025. That's nuts and next year. And that didnt even include Bungie games. By next year, maybe in total you got a handful of new GAAS games and baseball games are already part of that number. Concord and Fairgames are two of them. Cancelled Factions 2 and that cancelled Deviation Studios game are two more. And a Horizon game. There's so many, I always forget which games make up the 12.

 

[Sgt.Asher]

The 2024 award for "most entertaining game without ever playing" goes to...

 

[Unknown Soldier]

I could have been President, according to Lords of Me Research

 

[kruis]

IMMEDIATE flaw in their method:

>Assumes all 1,972 people accredited to the game worked on it full-time for the whole year.​

This is obviously not the case. Some of those people probably only worked on it for half a year, others maybe a month. Without knowing the specific people or their duration of time spent working on the title, you can't gauge how much it would've realistically costed. Ironically their napkin math for this (~ $177 million) also only assumes these people worked on the game for a single year, because that's how salaries work...they're stated in annual terms.

Now, they could have been averaging this out over a 4-6 year period and maybe also remembered that the game didn't enter full production (including outsourcing) until later on. But, I strongly doubt they did, so at this point I'm making up excuses to cover what they didn't consider.

...

Look, I think Concord is a joke and its catastrophic failure to launch can't be ignored or downplayed. It was a massive bomb for SIE, plain and simple. However, we don't need to make up random numbers to attach an arbitrary price to that failure. Knowing it failed is enough, especially when many of these numbers are being pulled out of proverbial ass cracks.

This "research" by Lords of Gaming is more like "Tales from my ass".

There are not 1972 but 1982 people that have "worked" on Concord, you can see the full listing on the Moby Games website. But there are only 140 actual Firewalk employees on that list. The other 1842 names includes the names of 46 former Firewalk employees and "production babies". The vast majority of the names are people from Sony Interactive Entertainment who were partially involved including company heads (Totoki, Ryan, Hulst), managers who did external relations, localizers, translators, recording engineers, dialogue supervisors, motion caption supervisors and technicians, testers, people working at the compliance department, ... the list goes on and on and on.

You can see that Sony provided technical assistance with parts of the game (like recording motion capture, dialogues, dubbing in other languages, translations) but it also includes services they provide for every first party game they publish (PR, marketing, compliancy testing, etc). Anyone working at Sony who was doing something Concord related for a short while is going to be be listed in those credits so no wonder those credit listings are enormous. And it's completely ridiculous to assume all of these people worked on Concord full-time for the entirety of the game's development. To call that misconception "research" is laughable.

 

[AmuroChan]

If that were the case, WTF was Sony thinking pouring $150 million into this garbage? If I were an upper management at Sony and saw that the developers were incompetent talentless hacks who couldn't get anything done with the time they were given, I would immediately call a meeting and tell my fellow managers that we should cut ties with them and announce we are no longer in a partnership with them. Would have saved Sony the embarrassment they would have received in August.

Because Herman Hulst was delusional and really believed that Concord could become the next Star Wars.

 

[JaksGhost]

All Sony had to do is keep doing what they are doing since LOU1 hit pay dirt in PS3 generation games like UC and LOU to go with legacy GOW. Keep making baseball and GT which are that have been around since PS1 days. And focus on SP games. PS4 had tons of new SP IPs that sold a ton.... Spidey, DG, Ghost, Horizon. Add in MP mode if needed, but focus on the core SP part first.

Just sit back, sell tons of SP copies, collect third party 30% cuts and coast. Problem is they got greedy.

They probably got sick of all the third party companies like Epic and Activision bragging about MTX galore. Like any pure software based tech company, once they get successful, they rake in tons of profits with abnormally high margins. Traditional companies like Sony who have hardware (or any company with lots of physical sales) will rarely have profit margins like a software company which is all employees, servers and digital downloads. They dont have to worry about much about inventory, warehousing or factories cranking out widgets to fill fleet trucks.

So they did a hard 180 and focused so much on GAAS, at one point one of those old 2022 PPT slides said I think they wanted 12 GAAS games by 2025. That's nuts and next year. And that didnt even include Bungie games. By next year, maybe in total you got a handful of new GAAS games and baseball games are already part of that number. Concord and Fairgames are two of them. Cancelled Factions 2 and that cancelled Deviation Studios game are two more. And a Horizon game. There's so many, I always forget which games make up the 12.

Now name the successes in the last 2 years such as God of War Ragnorok, Spider-Man 2, Horizon Forbidden West, Stellar Blade, Helldivers 2, Astro Bot, Gran Turismo 7, MLB The Show, etc. They keep releasing and publishing hit games and that's why they are still successful. Getting mad and upset about games that aren't even out yet or having Concord be this monolithic figure for some bullshit is getting tiring. It seems like most of you only have looked at one slide or heard one presentation and that shit stuck for life without letting anything else penetrate through. Hell you're talking about next year and we know they already have Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2 lined up with more single player titles.

 

[EDMIX]

They really meant 400 BILLION!

(some snake oil here for those slow enough to believe this btw)

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Now name the successes in the last 2 years such as God of War Ragnorok, Spider-Man 2, Horizon Forbidden West, Stellar Blade, Helldivers 2, Astro Bot, Gran Turismo 7, MLB The Show, etc. They keep releasing and publishing hit games and that's why they are still successful. Getting mad and upset about games that aren't even out yet or having Concord be this monolithic figure for some bullshit is getting tiring. It seems like most of you only have looked at one slide or heard one presentation and that shit stuck for life without letting anything else penetrate through. Hell you're talking about next year and we know they already have Ghost of Yotei and Death Stranding 2 lined up with more single player titles.

And with all the resources poured into GAAS that have failed, they could had made more SP games. Almost all the games you listed are sequels. New IPs are few and far between now when PS3 and PS4 generation had tons of them.

The Games Divisions profits are cut in half from a steady 13% to 6%. A lot of that would be from GAAS dev. And some of that is cost expense of Bungie acquisition (not the whole $3.6B), but whatever it cost to finalize the deal as per one of their earnings reports which stated it in a chart.

 

[hemo memo]

That's an appropriate budget for the "Future of PlayStation."

 

[JaksGhost]

And with all the resources poured into GAAS that have failed, they could had made more SP games. Almost all the games you listed are sequels. New IPs are few and far between now when PS3 and PS4 generation had tons of them.

The Games Divisions profits are cut in half from a steady 13% to 6%. A lot of that would be from GAAS dev. And some of that is cost expense of Bungie acquisition (not the whole $3.6B), but whatever it cost to finalize the deal as per one of their earnings reports which stated it in a chart.

Pouring more money into the same studios isn't going to net you more single player output without them buying more studios. The PS3 and PS4 era was filled with 3rd party exclusives and games published by them just like this generation. Insomniac for example didn't become a PlayStation Studio until after Spider-Man in 2019.

 

[Killjoy-NL]

And with all the resources poured into GAAS that have failed, they could had made more SP games. Almost all the games you listed are sequels. New IPs are few and far between now when PS3 and PS4 generation had tons of them.

This is such a dumb take.

What SP games would they have made otherwise, exactly?

There is absolutely no guarantee of that, or that it'd be games even worth releasing other than the fact that they'd be sp games.

Their main studios are already all working on SP games, so literally nothing changed about that and they wouldn't have been making something else anyway without the Gaas titles in production, because of aforementioned.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Pouring more money into the same studios isn't going to net you more single player output without them buying more studios. The PS3 and PS4 era was filled with 3rd party exclusives and games published by them just like this generation. Insomniac for example didn't become a PlayStation Studio until after Spider-Man in 2019.

This is such a dumb take.

What SP games would they have made otherwise, exactly?

There is absolutely no guarantee of that, or that it'd be games even worth releasing other than the fact that they'd be sp games.

Their main studios are already all working on SP games, so literally nothing changed about that and they wouldn't have been making something else anyway without the Gaas titles in production, because of aforementioned.

Instead of spending all that money on cancelled games and studios, they could had used that money and increase capacity at existing studios.

That can help speed up game development or keep Factions 2 alive since it was gassed due to not enough resources at ND.

But instead rolled the dice on buying Bungie, Deviation studios, Firewalk, and Haven. All companies focused on GAAS shooter games. One company cost $3.6B and going down the tubes, one studio already shut down, one made Concord, and the other is another new studio with Fairgames. That's a lot of money committed.

 

[EDMIX]

Instead of spending all that money on cancelled games and studios, they could had used that money and increase capacity at existing studios.

yea...that doesn't make as much sense as you think.

Those studios are already doing just fine and working on content, they need studios to produce content in other areas they want to gain traction in like online gaming, thus bought studios and invested in different projects


So Sony is not looking to "speed up" any game, they want those games taking the fucking time needed to actually work, they are looking to expand markets and genres while those other games are being worked on.

So they've "rolled" the dice many times and I'd argue that is why they are in the strong position that they are in, they do new IP all the time, they make risk all the time.

The last thing I'd want is for them to play it safe and just double down on the same.

So those GAAS games failing is no fucking different then LAIR failing or Heavenly Sword failing, or Starhawk or MAG or something like that, they want to take the risk, try new and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out, but they are still correct to widen the market and explore the MP concepts and Bungie is one of the most solid teams anyone can buy for something like this.

One company cost $3.6B and going down the tubes

And? Thats a long term investment for Sony, clearly they see Online gaming isn't going to fucking disappear man, it makes sense to have such a solid team and IP under Playstation for when Destiny 3 rolls out as I'm sure that will make Sony lots of money when it releases on all platforms.

So yea, i agree its a lot of money committed, but that is what you do when you wish to seriously invest in a market. This isn't 2006 any more man, Sony has zero reason to play a wait and see on a proven market, with proven teams.

Studios shut down, games get cancelled, this is the nature of the business and I don't know of any move anyone can make that can 100% make certain zero cancels, zero closes downs or any fairytale shit some on here are huffing lol


I mean, shit ,you can't even assure us that if this was spent on some single player thing it would knock it out of the park.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

I mean, shit ,you can't even assure us that if this was spent on some single player thing it would knock it out of the park.

And nobody can assure lots of GAAS new games will succeed either.

Of course it's no guarantee a new SP game would be a home run. But their track record is SP games do great and their MP shooters dont, which they tried a lot back in the day and failed. I think out of all their decent budget first party SP games, the worst selling one is DG at 8M copies. All the others break 10M+

 

[EDMIX]

But their track record is SP games do great and their MP shooters dont

lol ok, which is why they wanted to invest more in the area they've been weak in for a long time by getting established teams to make those concepts now...

I mean.... wow...did you not get that is why they were investing more in MP?


If you even look at the studios under Sony, none of their studios have ever dropped some 20 million seller ON THE FIRST FUCKING IP! That has never occurred at Sony, the studios that did this, GG, Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Santa Monica have worked with Sony for a long time before that ever happened


So for Sony, they want to nurture those studios and keep working with them until they find their Spiderman's, Last Of Us, God Of War 2018s or Horizon's

Look at Helldivers, the first game did not do the same type of numbers that 2 did

 

[TheKratos]

Ain't no way 2k FTE with 90k average worked on this turd.

if it was this straightforward than ubisoft games would be costing a buttload too with gazillion ppl working on it.

 

[EDMIX]

Ain't no way 2k FTE with 90k average worked on this turd.

if it was this straightforward than ubisoft games would be costing a buttload too with gazillion ppl working on it.

This^

Thank you for the common sense.

Not only does Ubisoft spend longer, they'd have teams with like 1500 or 2000 plus working on some of their titles.

 

[Robb]

 

[Thebonehead]

Over 400 million?

 

[Fabieter]

It could even have been $500 million!

Thes relaunch the whole thing maybe they will get there.

 

[Moses85]

 

[Killjoy-NL]

Instead of spending all that money on cancelled games and studios, they could had used that money and increase capacity at existing studios.

That can help speed up game development or keep Factions 2 alive since it was gassed due to not enough resources at ND.

So you're arguing against their Gaas-strategy by suggested Sony should've instead increased capacity at ND to continue Factions 2?

But instead rolled the dice on buying Bungie, Deviation studios, Firewalk, and Haven. All companies focused on GAAS shooter games. One company cost $3.6B and going down the tubes, one studio already shut down, one made Concord, and the other is another new studio with Fairgames. That's a lot of money committed.

You'd rather get studios like Japan and London Studios that get closed later on because they don't sell enough?

 

[FoxMcChief]

Concord is the gift that keeps on giving.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

So you're arguing against their Gaas-strategy by suggested Sony should've instead increased capacity at ND to continue Factions 2?


You'd rather get studios like Japan and London Studios that get closed later on because they don't sell enough?

Sure why not. Factions 2 was already in dev and looked like they need extra resources to finish it off. ND makes good games and Factions 2 even tags along the LOU franchise. Why ditch it and buy up new studios with zero games like Deviation, FW and Haven?

If there's no good studios to buy then save the money or sink it into existing studios. Sony even has a history of buying up studios which they have a direct relationship with making games until an acquisition is agreed upon. Why ditch that successful strategy and have bottomless pockets for Bungie, and the 3 noname studios, where all 4 are going for shooters?

 

[Mattyp]

I like Lord Incognito. He and Mattyp do a great job on their podcast. Had no idea this was his site. This is pure cringe though. Probably need to reign in this Subeg Dhaliwal fellow. Outside of some cheap clicks, this ain't doing the site any favors.

I know I look like a black male but I identify as a white Chinese women, now that I’ve been outed I want everyone to remember that when addressing me.

 

[Cakeboxer]

It's not their money. What they celebrating? how much Sony lost or what.

These are lessons for them. Go back to what made you great, start with Wolverine.

Quit killing people like Joel, quit making SM a diversity character, get away from all the DEI shit and GAAS. Go make some more recognizable mainstream games because your good at that. I know you gotta change with the times but ill quote "evolution not revolution "

I got some bad news for you, SBI already got their claws (haha) into Wolverine.

 

[midnightAI]

During my research I believe they spent some money making this game

 

[Killjoy-NL]

Sure why not. Factions 2 was already in dev and looked like they need extra resources to finish it off. ND makes good games and Factions 2 even tags along the LOU franchise. Why ditch it and buy up new studios with zero games like Deviation, FW and Haven?

No idea. There probably is a good reason for it.
Afaik ND has at least 2 sp projects in production, so 'just increase capacity' wouldn't automatically mean that Factions 2 would be a succes.

Most logical reason for canceling it would be that Factions would just take too much focus away long-term, regardless of capacity.

If there's no good studios to buy then save the money or sink it into existing studios. Sony even has a history of buying up studios which they have a direct relationship with making games until an acquisition is agreed upon. Why ditch that successful strategy and have bottomless pockets for Bungie, and the 3 noname studios, where all 4 are going for shooters?

Sony has been pretty clear about why they want to expand their output with Gaas.
Just sinking more money into existing studios without experience with Gaas titles wouldnt make as much sense as investing in new studios that consist of devs with experience in Gaas.

In both cases, the teams would be new and so would their games be.

 

[ShaiKhulud1989]

This method is not scientific, it’s idiotic.

I fully expect Sony to lose a good 100-150 million on Concord (they’ve cut marketing budget pretty early too), but some people went full retard around Concord for no apparent reason.

It’s like The Order, MAG, Lair, and Move happened to another company. And one can argue that things like PSN hack lost way more money.

Sony will be alright and Concord will be dead without people inventing insane numbers out of thin air.

 

[SJRB]

 

[DenchDeckard]

Biggest flop in gaming history right here folks.

James Sawyer Ford in tatters

 

[mckmas8808]

Concord has 1,972 credited staff and one of the founders of Kinda Funny's wives worked on the game. Colin knows.

I think the point is, the first company was irresponsible with the money, spent the $250m and needed Sony to bail them out. Which is how you get to (around) $400m.

Where did they get the first $250 million from?

 

[SweetTooth]

I did some researchs on Concord, It costs $1.5B.

Huge disaster if you ask me.

 

[Gen.Grievous]

Next week 1 billion. It doesn't even have to make sense to farm engagement.

 

[Physiognomonics]

It could even have been $500 million!

Don't worry, It still can. Because it's the future of Playstation.

 

[Schmendrick]

This turd still lives rent free in a lot of people`s heads it seems.

 

[Physiognomonics]

All Sony had to do is keep doing what they are doing since LOU1 hit pay dirt in PS3 generation games like UC and LOU to go with legacy GOW. Keep making baseball and GT which are that have been around since PS1 days. And focus on SP games. PS4 had tons of new SP IPs that sold a ton.... Spidey, DG, Ghost, Horizon. Add in MP mode if needed, but focus on the core SP part first.

Just sit back, sell tons of SP copies, collect third party 30% cuts and coast. Problem is they got greedy.

They probably got sick of all the third party companies like Epic and Activision bragging about MTX galore. Like any pure software based tech company, once they get successful, they rake in tons of profits with abnormally high margins. Traditional companies like Sony who have hardware (or any company with lots of physical sales) will rarely have profit margins like a software company which is all employees, servers and digital downloads. They dont have to worry about much about inventory, warehousing or factories cranking out widgets to fill fleet trucks.

So they did a hard 180 and focused so much on GAAS, at one point one of those old 2022 PPT slides said I think they wanted 12 GAAS games by 2025. That's nuts and next year. And that didnt even include Bungie games. By next year, maybe in total you got a handful of new GAAS games and baseball games are already part of that number. Concord and Fairgames are two of them. Cancelled Factions 2 and that cancelled Deviation Studios game are two more. And a Horizon game. There's so many, I always forget which games make up the 12.

And with all the resources poured into GAAS that have failed, they could had made more SP games. Almost all the games you listed are sequels. New IPs are few and far between now when PS3 and PS4 generation had tons of them.

The Games Divisions profits are cut in half from a steady 13% to 6%. A lot of that would be from GAAS dev. And some of that is cost expense of Bungie acquisition (not the whole $3.6B), but whatever it cost to finalize the deal as per one of their earnings reports which stated it in a chart.

100% agree. This is so obvious to me too. They were doing record profits from their games in 2019, just before their change of heart and strategy. Why change a perfectly oiled formula? Because managers happened at Playstation (Ryan) and as usual spoiled everything.

Because they were greedy and mistaken. And now they are failing big. Those numbers show it. And it's only the beginning. Right now they are saved by the remnants of the old strategy that still lives in their east ventures. But those games won't be enough to earn back those billions they are losing. So they'll make even bigger mistakes (like day one PC for all games) and soon it will be over for them, they'll become has been like Sega and MS.

 

[clarky]

Biggest flop in gaming history right here folks.

James Sawyer Ford in tatters

Id say James Sawyer Ford analysis was much better than the nonsense in the OP.

 

[DenchDeckard]

Id say James Sawyer Ford analysis was much better than the nonsense in the OP.

100%, im just pulling his leg

 

[Tiago Rodrigues]

"according to Lords of Gaming Research"

I'm still waiting for a single reputable source. Who's next? Jez?

 

[EN250]

That would explain why they are not willing to give up on this turd.

They aren't relaunching the game, there is no way
Devs are that oblivious to reality

Looked awful from the start, Guardians of the Overwatch: DIE Dialed up to 11 Edition and like 10 years too late into an oversaturated market that transitioned from HS to BR and now F2P

 

[GymWolf]

400 millin but how many krillin?

 

[winjer]

And Sony wasting more money trying to save this turd, just makes it funnier.
Concord is the most fun I've ever had with a game I didn't buy.

 

[PendekarRajawali]

No need to panic, it's only 400 milliln.

 

[Topher]

I know I look like a black male but I identify as a white Chinese women, now that I’ve been outed I want everyone to remember that when addressing me.

That's funny, but to be clear I did say "He and Mattyp". My eyes ain't what they used to be, but they can still discern the difference between a black man and someone who is CLEARLY a white Chinese woman.