Concord Reportedly Cost $400 Million to Make, Represents Sony's 'Biggest Loss Ever'

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Concord, Sony's first-party multiplayer title, launched on August 23 on PS5 and PC, but failed to attract players with its Overwatch-style 5v5 hero shooter premise. After dismal player numbers on Steam and poor sales, the PlayStation parent took Concord offline on September 6 and refunded all players who had purchased the game. After its two-week run, the online shooter, which spent years in development and was supposed to be Sony's big live service bet, ended up a massive commercial failure. A new claim from an industry insider, however, has shed some light on just how big a flop Concord was for Sony.

Speaking on the Sacred Symbols podcast, industry insider Colin Moriarty, citing a source who claimed to have worked on Concord, said the game cost $400 million (roughly Rs. 3,341 crore) to make. He also said that the game was internally referred to as “the future of PlayStation,” with Sony believing the game had the potential to become a Star Wars-like franchise.

“The reason that I wanted to talk about it [Concord] is because some of the assumptions that I'd made about the game were dead wrong, as far as how much it cost and how much Sony really lost on it,” Moriarty said on the podcast last week. “Concord cost about $400 million,” he added.

I spoke extensively with someone who worked on Concord, and it's so much worse than you think.

It was internally referred to as "The Future of PlayStation" with Star Wars-like potential, and a dev culture of "toxic positivity" halted any negative feedback.

Making it cost $400m. pic.twitter.com/F5O0oy4gaQ

It's unlikely, however, that Sony bore the entirety of that cost. According to Moriarty, about $200 million (roughly Rs. 1,670 crore) had already been spent on developing Concord by the time the game entered its alpha stage around the first quarter of 2023. It's unclear how much of that development cost came from Sony, before the company acquired Concord developer Firewalk Studios from its previous owner, ProbablyMonsters, in April