We have a bombshell story about what happened behind the scenes at Firewalk Studios.
This comes from Colin Moriarty, a former video game journalist at IGN and now owner of Last Stand Media on YouTube. Colin says he was approached in private by someone who worked on Concord.
As Colin is no longer a journalist, he was hesitant to share this rumor. But he talked to the source for some time, and decided to move forward because these claims dispute what many others have heard and believed. We will summarize their claims below, but you can watch Colin talking about this on Twitter here.
Sony started working with Firewalk’s original owner, ProbablyMonsters, between late 2020 to 2021. In Q1 of 2023, Concord was in alpha, and $ 200 million had already been spent on the game. Colin doesn’t know how that budget breaks down between Sony and ProbablyMonsters.
Colin’s source then claims that Concord was in a ‘laughable shape’ at this time. Sony decided they wanted to finish this project, so they spent another $ 200 million getting outside developers to work on the game, to make it a “minimum viable product”.
In that state, a game like it would be good enough to pitch to investors, but that is usually not the final version of the game. If you know how games are sometimes pitched to companies incomplete as a ‘vertical slice’, minimum viable product is even further down the line, to the point where you know it can be completed and brought to market.
Colin says that from Q1 2023 to the game’s release, Firewalk and those other studios hadn’t worked on two major game elements. One of them is onboarding, AKA the process by which new players learn how to play the game. The other element is monetization, and from what we’ve learned about Sony’s live service plans, they seemed determined to make all of their games retail at $ 40.
But that’s not all. Colin pointed out that Sony paid for most (not all) of that $ 400 million budget, and it definitely sets the record for Sony’s biggest loss on a single video game. But Sony has even bigger budgets for other upcoming 1st party and 2nd party projects in the works. If those include Marathon and Fairgame$, Concord is only the start.
Colin points the finger directly for this at Hermen Hulst, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment Studio Business Group. It was Hermen who saw Concord in Q1 2023, and allegedly saw it as ‘the future of PlayStation.”
Hermen also thought it could be a huge IP like Star Wars, in the sense that they could keep making video games and media about the IP. This explains the upcoming Concord Secret Level episode, and the plans to release weekly CG cutscenes at a massive cost.
Colin also blames part of the problem with Concord’s development to a ‘toxic positivity’ vibe in the company, that didn’t allow employees to say any bad thing about the game. This sounds a lot like what industry veteran Laura Fryer opined to be a broken feedback loop in Firewalk, as she experienced in producing some of her own games.
Now, the first reaction we saw was some people pointing out that the $ 400 million budget is not believable. Christopher Dring stated that “Concord didn’t even get any above-the-line marketing spend.” Some people pointed out that Colin has shared wrong rumors before, and we have pointed out the same about Dring ourselves.
But Ethan Gach at Kotaku, who reported last week on Ryan Ellis stepping down at Firewalk, has chimed in as well. In his words:
“I can corroborate the part about toxic positivity. Some sources I’ve spoken with blamed a head in the sand mentality carried over from the studio’s Bungie roots.
A sense the game would come together because the team was too good to fail. I’ll have more next week.”
At this point, we think it’s fair to cast doubts on any of the stories that we have heard about Firewalk Studios and Concord behind the scenes. Even if you don’t believe the claimed $ 400 million budget, the other information from Colin’s source runs counter to a lot of the speculation that we have heard about the game. And at the same time, it paints a credible picture, as a similar situation was allegedly to blame for the issues surrounding Bungie.
And in that bigger picture, we see Pete Parsons filled with hubris over Destiny 2, Hermen Hulst feeling the same about Concord, and to a lesser extent, Insomniac’s hubris overspending on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. One could argue that this suggests a bigger problem with management at PlayStation, and there’s also a credible case that this points to Sony struggling with the same challenges other game companies face today.
But do you remember when Sony CFO/COO Hiroki Totoki said that PlayStation didn’t understand how to make “overall growth and sustainable profitability for increasing margins?” It looks like this is exactly what he was talking about. It’s probably also the reason why Hiroki, as the man at Sony who runs the books, also made himself PlayStation’s chairman. Hermen Hulst, in his position as CEO, answers directly to Totoki. We can only imagine what conversations they have had about this game, while the world could only see the end result.
