Game lasted 2 weeks, but how much money did it lose?

[Jimmy MacReady]

Title

[Chronocide]

Originally posted by Hydran Agent:

Title

Says they are issuing refunds.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1f83qls/concord_will_be_taken_offline_sept_6_sales_will/

So I guess money is whatever wasn't refunded...

[Fighteraviator120]

100% +-5%

[Chronocide]

Ah, here's one from sony
https://blog.playstation.com/2024/09/03/an-important-update-on-concord/

[Jimmy MacReady]

Wow, a quick google search apparently said it was $200+ million budget on this game too. Did the game even reflect any of that?

[heiven]

Its reported that the game costed from 100-200 million dollars. So ... a lot. And thats not counting any additional expenses like the concord theme controller.

[id795078477]

Let's see. From the Firewalk web-site[www.firewalkstudios.com]:

Firewalk is a game development studio based in Bellevue, Washington

So a quick check from google search[gusto.com] (taking the first web-site which has easy breakdown by job family), we see that an engineer 50% percentile earns about $132.000. Add extra employer costs on top of it, like insurance and taxes and you're landing at ~$180.000.

Now, of course, not everyone is an engineer - there are QA, designers, etc. Some will be paid less. But there are also execs, C-suit, directors, middle management - which will be paid way more. And I took 50%, i.e. middle of the middle (a good engineer makes $200.000 so there's that).

Next, Firewalk is ~150 employees. So let's do some math: $180.000 x 150 = $27.000.000 per year just on the salaries of the employees. It was in production for at least 8 years (actually, it's 10 years because 2 years of pre-production, but I'll have mercy and exclude those costs). We get: 8 x $27.000.000 = $216.000.000 on just the keeping up the studio.

Now, Sony also had to buy the studio. Normally I'd need to consider all of the other IPs in the portfolio of said studio to have a fair assessment of how much of the M&A cost actually can be attributed to a specific game, but .. Firewalk makes it easy because it only has .. one game! So the full M&A price must be included into Concord's production price. I do not have the number here but I cannot fathom such a price being below $50.000.000 so I'll roll with that. The tally thus far: $216.000.000 + $50.000.000 = $266.000.000

Finally, we've only calculated the production costs. But there's also a big chunk that goes into the marketing. They were planning the whole Amazon episodes for chist's sake. To be fair, they didn't have the same insane push as Overwatch in 2016, but I could say that it's probably also in the range of $50.000.000 by the looks of it. Making the final tally of $266.000.000 + $50.000.000 = $316.000.000

I'll also have mercy and exclude the supplementary costs, like upkeep of the office buildings, commercial real estate rent, costs on hosting and other tech infra, costs on licenses for the software used to develop games, costs of any corporate benefits, etc, etc - but if I'd include those too, I would probably need to beef up the bill by additional $10 - $15 mil.

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TL;DR: $216.000.000 as a bare, bare minimum of confirmed costs (without any guesstimates from me), up to and likely exceeding $330.000.000 if you include my guesstimates.

[businesscat]

Originally posted by Fighteraviator120:

100% +-5%

5% is extremely generous is probably more like +-1%

[The Neon Demon]

It depends. If it's budget was $200 million, it then lost even more by keeping the game running for 2 weeks. Servers to run a game that was projected to have hundreds of thousands of players aren't cheap. Then refunding everyone on top of it, they lost any and all sales. This game was nothing but a money sink for Sony, a colossal failure.

[HidesHisFace]

Originally posted by Hydran Agent:

Title

Consider that they are issueing refunds.

That means they lost pretty much ALL of it.

[fenixblue]

200 million was the Sony buy out of the studio alone, then you have marketing, the controller, multiplat is costly as well but the biggest chunk of change thrown in the toilet along with the IP was the animations they paid good money to push.

Animating a show take s a lot of time and money, just look at Arcane which was amazing and took 7 years, but Sony tried to put the cart before the wagon banking on it being a hit instead of having an actual fanbase first that gives a damn about these DEI abominations.

Servers arent cheap, but were somehow the less sunken cost than just refunding maybe a million of what it sold for if you believed the 25k sales.

[BEEP!]

Well how much did they spend on servers that's how much they lost plus the what 200+mill of making the game marketing and wages for 8years and buying the studio.