# Concord and the Coat of Many Failures Last week, Colin Moriarty broke some spicy *Concord* news on Sacred Symbols [Episode 325 – The Relentless March of Progress](https://www.patreon.com/posts/sacred-symbols-112415546). It did not take long for headlines to flood my RSS reader and they looked a little like this: *Concord* Cost Almost HALF A BILLION DOLLARS![^1] While making breakfast yesterday, I listened to the excerpt Colin posted from the show—then I just listened to [the entire segment](https://youtube.com/watch?v=KewYRnDGsLM&t=3816) from the episode. It is one of those stories where your jaw drops and you have to pick it back up. In cranking my jaw back into its original position, I chewed on the news. As Colin so often says, I let it marinate. Sitting here now, writing this piece (before a State of Play this evening no less) I am reminded of a classic tale—[The Emperor's New Clothes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes). For the unfamiliar, [the story](https://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html) is straightforward. An emperor is very into fashion, a few con artist trick the emperor into wearing "clothes that are invisible to those who are incompetent or stupid." As the emperor parades through the town, no one speaks up, except for a small child. I wager you can imagine how I am drawing this analogy. Sony is our emperor, obsessed not with fashion, but with live service games and cross media. During their shopping spree for new games and developers, a studio presents a promise of a "Star Wars-like" property that could be the future of the brand.[^2] Sony buys the game and the team. The game is delivered in some fashion. Where the story deviates is that, once exposed to the public, there was little doubt of *Concord*'s viability. Rather than continuing to parade around, Sony put on a new outfit and set out to make change. Colin's source and information stitch together an outfit of how "The Emperor" ended up without their clothes. Let's examine. ### Big Bazz Bucks How do I not start with the reported cost of the game? $400 million is stunning in its totality. When you look into how the game could have gotten to that amount though, the pieces fall into place. Before Sony entered the picture, Firewalk Studios was founded in 2018 under ProbablyMonsters. Based off my reading, ProbablyMonsters establishes and nurtures studios: I suppose the business term is incubation, but whenever I hear that term I just think of [this](https://www.jurassic-pedia.com/incubation-equipment-sf/). Three years later, the spaceball begins rolling. In April of 2021, Sony entered the picture with an [agreement to publish Firewalk's game](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210422005352/en/Firewalk-Studios-a-ProbablyMonsters-Studio-Reveals-Publishing-Partnership-with-Sony-Interactive-Entertainment-for-AAA-Multiplayer-Game). > [!quote] > ...their original multiplayer game will be an exciting addition to our portfolio...we’re thrilled to partner with a visionary studio like Firewalk to bring their truly ambitious experience to life. — Hermen Hulst It's just five months later that [ProbablyMonsters successfully raises $200 million](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/probablymonsters-raises-usd200m-to-make-games-with-a-people-first-culture) in [Series A funding](https://www.digitalocean.com/resources/articles/startup-funding-series-a-b-c). That amount for this type of funding is apparently [rare](https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattgardner1/2021/09/01/probablymonsters-raises-200-million-in-record-breaking-series-a-game-funding/), cited at the time as the "biggest Series A raise in gaming ever."[^3] From my *very* general understanding, Series A lets investors get in on the ground-ish floor with the hopeful promise of a return on their investment later. I am reminded of Humane and seeing the stories over the years of their [millions](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/humane-raises-100m-in-series-b-301366877.html) [raised](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/humane-raises-100m-in-series-c-round-as-it-builds-device-and-services-platform-for-the-ai-era-301765582.html) in funding.[^4] Another [$50 million](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/probably-monsters-raises-usd200m-in-series-a) would be raised over the next seven months. This funding was to be spread around their three studios. And [Games Industry.biz asks the obvious question](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/probablymonsters-raises-usd200m-to-make-games-with-a-people-first-culture) back then, emphasis my own. > The big question when that much money is being poured into a company is what it's doing that could produce a return on that much investment. The descriptions ProbablyMonsters has given about its projects provide little clue as to what sort of disruptive innovation the company is pursuing overall. Still, Ryan says there's an expectation to be "massively disrupting." > > "When we were building the launch plans for the company itself and ***looking around the industries of both linear and interactive entertainment***, there really wasn't anyone doing what we're doing," Ryan says. "It's why you saw us define ourselves as a new category of game company. I think a lot of what we're doing is very different." What I cannot find out (probably for obvious reasons) is whether or not Sony itself was an investor in this funding event.[^5] Clearly, a deal and relationship was met between the companies. I can't help but wonder how much of this $250 million was Sony's to begin with. For more obvious reasons, I feel *very* safe in saying that the whole funding was not spent on Firewalk or *Concord*. ProbablyMonsters had three studios cooking. We'll never know the exact amount spent specifically on *Concord*, but perhaps its a good guess that it was a sizable chunk, considering it's the first project from ProbablyMonsters in eight years to see the light of day. It is then a year later in April 2023 that [Sony outright purchases Firewalk](https://sonyinteractive.com/en/press-releases/2023/sony-interactive-entertainment-to-acquire-firewalk-studios-from-probablymonsters-inc/) with its 150~ employees and IP from ProbablyMonsters, a move that makes more sense for the incubator the more I read about this. Years after raising money with nothing to show, don't you think ProbablyMonsters would be eager to sell off a team to theoretically appease investors that poured millions into Howard Ryan's company? Pure speculation on my part to be sure, but I'd like to see some sort of return on my investment by then. It's at this point in the story that Colin reports that *Concord* was in an alpha state with no real work done on two key design elements—onboarding and monetization. Over the course of the next year, Sony reportedly spent $200 million of their own cash to get the game out in August 2024. The question now becomes "Why did Sony buy Firewalk when *Concord* was in this seemingly dire state?" During the PS4 and PS5 generations, Sony is no stranger to spending hundreds of millions on their games. *The Last of Us Part II* [[The Last of Us Part II Cost a Cool $200 Million to Develop|cost $220 million]]. *Marvel's Spider-Man 2* [[Burying the Insomniac Leak|cost over $300 million]]. There are more games too. As I pointed out in [[Burying the Insomniac Leak#^53b8d8|this footnote]] when talking about the legendary Insomniac leak, all of these games were sequels and all of those games made their investment [[The Last of Us Part II sells more than 4 million copies – PlayStation.Blog|back]] [within](https://x.com/insomniacgames/status/1722511138058109076) [days](https://x.com/hermenhulst/status/1595432466432593922). *Concord* was a brand-spanking new IP that ended up [selling a projected 25,000 copies](https://www.eurogamer.net/concord-has-sold-just-25000-copies-estimate-industry-analysts#:~:text=%22Concord%20should%20have%20launched%20free,of%20the%20PlayStation%20Plus%20subscription.%22&text=Concord%20is%20estimated%20to%20have,and%20around%2015%2C000%20on%20PlayStation.), which were almost all refunded. It's an unprecedented spend and loss, no matter how you slice it. So what did this $400 million buy? It bought two things: a promise of the stars and the crash landing that actually happened. ### Hermen Hulst's Star Child After the 💸💸💸 news, the most interesting tidbit to me was that *Concord* was CEO, Studio Business Group Hermen Hulst's "baby." As friend-of-the-blog Dustin Furman pointed out, Jim Ryan would have been my first guess. > "Yeah, well, the biggest, I don't know about the most interesting thing, but the thing that sticks out to me right now is that you said that Hermen Hulst was the champion of this game, because I think that without this information, if we wanted to point a finger, we probably would have at Jim Ryan, being that, assumingly this was set into motion under his leadership, but if he was trusting in Hermen Hulst, who's now become (Co-CEO) as well, that's concerning."[^6] According to Colin's source, Sony viewed *Concord* as a *Star-Wars*-like project with immense cross media potential. Let's circle back to that Howard Ryan quote I used earlier; > [!quote] > "When we were building the launch plans for the company itself and ***looking around the industries of both linear and interactive entertainment***, there really wasn't anyone doing what we're doing." The idea to pursue this cross-industry fusion sounds baked into ProbablyMonsters and its teams from the outset—woven into the very fabric of the companies. I think this inherent pursuit of the multimedia experience was a crippling factor. More now than ever before, we are seeing video games break onto television and the [huge silver screen](https://youtube.com/watch?v=KiEeIxZJ9x0&t=33), but today's hits weren't designed with Hollywood in mind. *Fallout* came out nearly 30 years ago. *God of War* was nearly 20 years. *The Last of Us* just passed a decade.[^7] I'm not saying that something new can't be designed for the cross media business and succeed, but the models we see working have established themselves as one medium before tackling another. This cinematic fusion is so evident in *Concord*'s presentation as well. The [first real trailer](https://youtube.com/watch?v=mBnStS9d2xg) for the game made it look like a game with team based missions, not a team-based shooter à la *Overwatch*. Instead of *Star Wars*, it screams *Guardians of the Galaxy* in a very "[we have *Guardians* at home](https://x.com/JikissGamer/status/1691548841596669952)" sort of way. It is apparent in the promised [weekly vignettes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=VB2usfhu8Nc), which, for the record, I thought was a neat idea. The pursuit of linear entertainment is so apparent that *Concord* has an episode in that anthology series—[Secret Level](https://youtube.com/watch?v=gLihxsmI_OU)—coming to Amazon Prime this year. All of this strikes me as a distraction from *game design*. The disciplines are not the same. *Concord* had no clear direction or vision for what it wanted to be because it wanted to be everything all at once.[^8] It's not hard to imagine that resources were spent in the pre-acquisition years wholly devoted to the story, universe, lore building side, which becomes all the more apparent when paired with the claim that onboarding and monetization were not even worked on until post-acquisition. ### A Case of the Kyps I've mentioned it throughout the piece so far, but it sounds like not a whole lot of the game was ready to rock when Sony bought the team. Major outsourcing sounds like it was the bulk of the budgetary spending for this second $200 million. I saw folks quick to point out the length of the credits, which sits at a staggering [1 hour and 12 minutes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zfbu0De0oBU). I also saw at least one developer, Anthony Vaccaro, try to explain the length as Sony being "[great about crediting everyone, especially listing every person at studios they outsource too](https://x.com/vaccaro3d/status/1837650842679496998)," which I find to be true in the crediting individuals category. It does not compare though, duration wise. Look at *The Last of Us Part II Remastered,* the last game Anthony Vaccaro's employer Naughty Dog shipped: [22 minutes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bbdnDMShr-4). *God of War: Ragnarök*? [33 minutes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=tJcJ-6fYi2Y). Perhaps the second most expensive PlayStation Studios game, *Marvel's Spider-Man 2* will come close? [38 minutes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=mm-h0KzHJkg). *Concord* handily beats out the original release of *Grand Theft Auto V* at [37 minutes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=RLOPbZECC4E) AND the PS5 re-release from two years ago at [1 hour and 8 minutes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=whGBBLrKk_I). Sony games (currently) do not have hour long credits. I'm not saying the duration of a credits sequence directly correlates to the budget. What I am saying is that the proportion of people that worked on *Concord* appears to greatly outweigh their previous successes. Quantity is not translating to quality here. Another term brought up in regards to the game's development was "toxic positivity." > [!quote] > "A major thing about the game is that there was, and I think we can kind of get this vibe from just the nature of the people making it and kind of the way the game reads and all that, a toxic positivity vibe. You weren't allowed to say anything internally about this game; about how like something's wrong with it, character designs are not right, and so on and so forth. They really truly believe, this was Herman Hulse's baby, apparently. And he internally was, it was himself, a massive champion of the game." This sounds familiar... > "The townsfolk uncomfortably go along with the pretense, not wanting to appear inept or stupid..." I think this mindset can be traced all the way back to ProbablyMonsters and their [people-first approach](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/probablymonsters-raises-usd200m-to-make-games-with-a-people-first-culture) to building studios. > [!quote] > "Often teams come to me initially and say, 'Here's our development plan!' And I'm like, 'No. What's your people plan? First, tell me the words and the practices you want to use to convey the internal culture of your studio or of your team." It sounds like the idea that *Concord* was the future became so believed that it *had* to be the future. Its fate was sealed with the very first stitch. ProbablyMonsters and Firewalk sold a garment of a game to Sony and no-one along the way had the ability or courage to point out obvious truths about cost, development, and longevity. So the procession marched on to release. On August 23, 2024, we all saw the Emperor without his clothes. [^1]: Dramatized and completely made up for effect. [^2]: I want to be clear, I am not suggesting that Firewalk is run by con-artists. That is not a part of my analogy here. [^3]: I have no clue if this record holds to this day. [^4]: Which was all funneled into developing the [[Humane Tries to Tell Us What Ai Pin is Again|Humane Ai Pin]] which, uh, did not turn out well. [^5]: I was able to find some of the [seed round investors](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/harold-ryan-sets-up-probablymonsters) though. [^6]: Dustin originally said "president" not "Co-CEO." Colin actually corrects him right after. I'd normally use square brackets to convey this editorial correction, but Obsidian doesn't like single square brackets, so I opted for the parentheses. Please forgive my stylistic error. I just didn't want to quote a two sentence correction. [^7]: Had to have a nice 3, 2, 1. [^8]: This vein reminds me of ~~Ash Fall~~ Trace War from Michael Mumbauer and John Garvin at Liithos with its comics and [[Michael Mumbauer has Left That’s No Moon Entertainment for Web3|web3 blockchain nonsense]]. A whole lot of lore and IP diversification, not a whole lot of game so far.