$200M before the Sony acquisition and $200M after. It’s a little hard to believe. The story seems to only be coming from Colin Moriarty right now, but I trust Jordan Middler to consider it at least reasonably plausible if he wrote it up for VGC.
When are publishers going to realize there is only a market for like 2-3 Live service games at any one time?
You cannot underestimate the stupidity of games publishers. I’d be willing to accept that sunk-cost alone is the explanation for this outrageous budget. It probably started out as “what’s $200m for the next Fortnight?” and just went in $5 or $10 million dollar increments from there.
I’m hoping most of that money was spent on developers and salaries since it would appear they didn’t spend shit on advertising. Silver lining to a failure is that at least people had jobs for a good while
You’re telling me this cost more to develop than GTA V ?
That’s rough, buddy
200m is bad enough
…on what?
Just heard the story. Apparently it cost 200m by the point they presented the alpha and it was absolute crap. So Sony put another 200m into outsourcing the work asap to fix it.
I could take one look at those models and animations and tell you it wasn’t cheap. Then probably a lot of money went into those CG cut-scenes that were intended to be rolled out weekly.
Salaries and servers.
It didn’t cost 400 million. There’s no way a game like this can cost more than something like The Last of Us 2.
So funny story, people can waste a ton of money making something for way more than it should have cost.
The credits roll is like legit an hour and a half long. Id believe it.
8 years of development under multiple publishers will bleed a lot of money. They also hired on a lot of “experienced devs” from different game studios to head the different departments, and presumably paid them well enough to get them to leave their original companies.
This is probably the biggest lesson against the gamer mindset of “Give the developers time to work, and they’ll polish it to a shine.” Sometimes, even time doesn’t improve the end product if the idea wasn’t great. It might even indicate that on some instances where publishers scrapped a ‘cool’ project that was in the works, it was actually the right call. It might have been a Concord waiting to happen.
Yeah it seems like the source is a podcast saying a number like after talking with a staff member of concord. I would have thought that people below executive/finance suite wouldn’t have that information. Not sure if they talked to someone in there but $400 million is just a bit steep.
Not impossible with tech salaries being what they are though, maybe it includes the buyout of the entire studio by Sony in that number though.
Hush, the accountants promised they’d fall for it!
