We have more reason to believe that Concord really did cost $ 400 million.
To recap, YouTuber Colin Moriarty went forward with a source who shared behind the scenes information about Sony’s beleaguered live service title. Moriarty’s source claimed that the game cost $ 400 million in total, and it still wasn’t good enough upon launch.
But Moriarty also made it clear that he did not believe Sony spent all that $ 400 million themselves. As he explained it in his original podcast, Sony saw the state of the game in Q1 2023, decided to finish it, and spent $ 200 million to get it to the state it was in at launch, a few months ago.
In a later episode of his podcast, Moriarty pointed out that before Sony bought Concord, it was owned by a video game incubation company called ProbablyMonsters. And ProbablyMonsters made history when they raised $ 250 million in Series A funding in 2022. This was the the largest single round of Series A funding in the video game industry’s history.
Now, Lords of Gaming writer Subeg Dhaliwal shares new information that may corroborate this claim. They found the trademark filing for Concord in the United States Patent and Trademark Office website.
A company called PeopleKnot, Inc. filed the application for the Concord trademark on February 26, 2018. The trademark application also corroborates that Sony completed their acquisition of Firewalk Studios and their game on July 24, 2023.
As you may have guessed, PeopleKnot, Inc. would later change their name to ProbablyMonsters. A lot of the other information Subeg Dhaliwal shares here is information we have already reported on before. It is the same information that was found and shared by Colin Moriarty in his podcast, and by Michael Bell of Bellular News.
Subeg Dhaliwal also learned that Concord’s MobyGames page lists 1.972 people worked on the game, far more than the headcount of Firewalk Studios, between 150 to 170 employees.
Subeg Dhaliwal’s discovery confirms two things:
- ProbablyMonsters definitely had control over the Concord project before Sony, to the point that they owned it as intellectual property
- Colin Moriarty’s source was vindicated. Nearly two thousand developers are credited in the production of Concord, and there may be even more staff who have not publicly revealed their involvement for various reasons.
Subeg Dhaliwal puts forward similar theories that Colin Moriarty and Michael Bell did in explaining how Concord’s development progressed. While the evidence they found is not as conclusive as a document that lists the game’s budget, it corroborates a lot of the story we have gotten so far from Moriarty’s source.
Hopefully, other journalists can share their own research and give us more insight into this situation. Because while it’s not impossible, its almost 99 % certain that Sony will never corroborate any of this.
