Two weeks ago, Sony Interactive Entertainment shut down the servers of Concord just 12 days after its launch. Since then, Concord was branded as Sony’s biggest failure since it launched the PlayStation on the market. Now, new reports seem to indicate that Sony’s failure with Concord has been bigger and we may be facing the biggest failure in the history of the video game industry. This is because Colin Moriarty, former journalist for the IGN media, revealed in his Podcast «Sacred Symbols» new information.
This new information—which makes Atari’s disaster clear E.T. from the 1980s as a bad weekend—comes from a member of the Firewalk Studio development team. This worker—whom Moriarty identified and verified as working at Concord— reached out to him to share some inside details.
Concord cost $400 million
Without a doubt, the most shocking news in this story is that Moriarty’s source revealed to him that the development of Concord cost Sony $400 million. Furthermore, the source added that Concord went so far and received so much money because it was a game championed by PlayStation’s top executives. More precisely by Herman Hulst, the company’s newly appointed co-CEO replacing Jim Ryan. Hulst, according to the source who contacted Moriarty, saw Concord as “her baby.” Also, internally, Concord It looked like a franchise that could be the moment “Star Wars» from PlayStation, and they called it «the future of PlayStation».
The former, at least for the source who contacted Moriarty, influenced the failure of the game. Since, no one was able to adequately criticize Concord due to the expectations that the management had of him. The source describes that around Concord A ring of “toxic positivity” was established, in which those in charge simply thought it couldn’t fail because they believed in it so much. These latest statements—about toxic positivity—resonate with recent reporting from Kotaku’s Ethan Gach.
Gach goes further, saying that some sources he spoke to said it stemmed from leadership coming from Bungie, where the common logic was that everything would magically work itself out in the end, with a “head-in-the-sand mentality.”
While this information is only corroborated by the credibility of the former IGN journalist, it is worth remembering that this game was eight years in development and there is still one episode left of the Prime Video anthology series.Secret Level» Inspired by Concord and the game’s credits are an hour long filled with people involved. Surely, there is a figure higher or very close to 400 million. The real question is Sony will revive Concord or it will continue to fatten the bag of losses that already makes this game the biggest failure in the history of the video game industry.
Via: PSU
