We have an interesting update on Colin Moriarty’s rumor about Concord.
As we reported it two weeks ago, Colin claimed that Sony’s fumble on the game was ultimately on Hermen Hulst. However, much of the talk about this rumor revolved around the claimed $ 400 million budget.
In the latest episode of the Sacred Symbols podcast, Colin addressed the skepticism about the budget, and his line of thinking that swayed him to share the rumor. There was no new information from this source, but he lays out a convincing argument, which we will summarize below.
First things first, Colin’s source has shared several confirmed rumors before. One of those rumors was the leaked script for the next Tomb Raider game in development. Square Enix seems to have confirmed that leak when they DMCA’d his podcast over it.
If that’s true, then this may have been the same source who told him that Bluepoint Games was making a Bloodborne 2 as a PlayStation 5 launch title. We cited that as a criticism that Moriarty got rumors wrong, but we failed to confirm that he took that rumor back very quickly. So he also doesn’t know how much to believe from his source, and he still vettes the rumors carefully.
- Colin laid out the four points about this rumor, that he believes will be corroborated in time:
- The ambition Sony and Firewalk Studios had for Concord had was enormous
- Concord was extremely expensive to make
- Firewalk Studios barely made anything worthwhile in the time they spent making the game
- Criticism of the project was internally forbidden
Colin goes on to criticize the gamers, and the games press practitioners, who scoffed at the $ 400 million budget. He pointed out that they could have verified that information with their own sources, and we can confirm that the criticism over the budget was simply the belief that it was too high.
Now, Colin proves his point, by doing some journalism himself. Specifically, he made his own investigation on ProbablyMonsters, and laid out his sources along the way.
I won’t detail every point he shared here, because interestingly enough, it’s very similar to the investigation Michael Bell made in his own video about the video game incubation company. We summarized that video ourselves, which you can read here.
Colin painted the picture of ProbablyMonsters being founded by former Bungie head Harold Ryan, and hiring other big name industry people like Ryan Ellis and Tony Hsu at great expense. ProbablyMonsters spent big and had big ambitions for their games.
Colin believes ProbablyMonsters also spent big on Concord, and was a big contributor to that $ 400 million budget. They raised $ 250 million in 2022, in what remains the largest single round of Series A funding in the video game industry’s history.
Why did Sony spend $ 200 million in Concord, after ProbablyMonsters already spent what could have been as much as another $ 200 million on it? Colin believes ProbablyMonsters was in a bad financial situation when they sold it and Firewalk Studios. On the flip side, he pointed out that we know Sony has also been spending big, and recently, at an irresponsible level.
And we do know that for a fact. Sony publicly disclosed it cost them $ 3.6 billion to buy Bungie, knowing the studio and its games wasn’t worth that much. The Rhysida ransomware hack also revealed that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 cost $ 315 million, which Insomniac head Ted Price belatedly criticized for being too much.
Finally, Colin believes that what we saw of Concord was not what was intended. He thinks Sony learned that it was not going to go well when Firewalk showed the game to them in Q1 2023, in what Colin previously referred to was a ‘laughable state.’
As Colin pointed out, dismissing the claims in the rumor outright doesn’t actually disprove the rumors from his source. That source has both shared information so credible he got DMCA’d for it, and also shared information he hat to take back.
Unless another compromising leak happens at Sony, we are unlikely to know for sure how much Concord cost, and how much of that came from Sony. But we would be more certain of it now, if more games press who do have their own sources checked to corroborate that information.
And it’s fine if sources say different things too. That’s how the Black Myth Wukong Xbox story played out. But it does the public, the consumers buying the games, a disservice, if rumors aren’t properly vetted when they come to light.
