Concord had $400m worth of “toxic positivity” in its development stage

A Concord dev shared with Colin Moriarty, that the $400m was spent on the game’s development. It is by far Sony’s most expensive until now and carried Star Wars’s level of expectation from the developers. Adding to the expectation the game was considered the “Future of Playstation” by the owners.

Colin Moriarity shared these details in his podcast “Sacred Symbols”, which was reached by the developer himself.

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

— Colin Moriarty (@longislandviper) September 20, 2024

Colin shared the clip on X from the yet unreleased episode of his podcast. He says “Someone who worked on Concord reached out to me,” to his co-hosts. Moriarity assured me that he verified the identity of this developer before having an extensive talk with him and got to know interesting bits about the unsuccessful Sony game.

Concord’s expenses hit $200m upto Alpha state

Moriarity further goes on by sharing that Concord reached its Alpha State in 2023, as a big milestone. This had happened before Sony hired a team although it was working with Probably Monsters

When Concord entered Alpha state, the game had already invested $200 million in its making. It’s not mentioned how much each of the companies, Probably Monsters or Sony had put in.

From the alpha state to the launch another sum of $200m was spent on the game as the game was still in bad shape with two important elements missing in its alpha state. The first element was the onboarding of players and character selection. Secondly, the monetization strategy also remained in development.  

“Toxic Positivity” was common in the studios of Concord 

“You weren’t allowed to say anything, apparently, internally, about this game. About how like, something’s wrong with it, character designs are not right, and so on and so forth.” – Colin Moriarty 

Moriarity tells, as shared by incognito dev, about the toxic positive culture in the studios. Apparently, no amount of criticism was welcomed in the making.

The high expectations of the game took a nose soon after the game was launched. No one played it which resulted in a hundred thousand dollars loss for the company. Sony officially removed Concord from the Playstation on 10th September.