Dragon Age veteran crunches the numbers on Concord's reported $400 million cost: "A project that is in trouble can get really big in an effort to get it over the finish line"
Oct. 1, 2024“Did it cost 400 million dollars? I’m not sure, I think we can make it plausible that it did”
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
BioWareveteran Mark Darrah has crunched the numbers on whether Concord’sreported$400 million development costs are accurate, essentially concluding that it’s entirely possible and plausible that it did.
Darrah also estimates the “fully loaded staff month”, that is how much it cost Sony to keep every member of Concord’s development team on staff, to be $15,000 a month. That doesn’t mean developers were making that much every month, but Darrah is estimating that each employee cost Sony that much in wages, supplies, hardware, office space, and also indirect costs including HR. He’s also using that number in an effort to see whether Concord’s reported $400 million development cost is even plausible, and according to his estimations, it is.
That 400 million claim has been pretty widely countered by journalists and fan analyses, but Darrah’s equally comprehensive investigation proves, in his mind, that it’s at the very least plausible that Sony spent that much on a game thatit pulled offline two weeks after launch.
“Did it cost 400 million dollars? I’m not sure, I think we can make it plausible that it did. Certainly for a game with as relatively small scope, it’s hard to see where all of that money went. It would’ve had to have been lost in iteration. It would have had to have been lost in inefficiencies due to team structure or massive team sizes. Like we just went through I think you can make the math work, and it might represent reality. It’s also possible that the sources that are providing this number are exaggerating, or misinformed, or are getting their math wrong in some other way.”
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Meanwhile, here are thebest PS5 gamesyou can play today.
After scoring a degree in English from ASU, I worked as a copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. Now, as GamesRadar’s west coast Staff Writer, I’m responsible for managing the site’s western regional executive branch, AKA my apartment, and writing about whatever horror game I’m too afraid to finish.
A month after approving free versions of Unreal games that “started it all,” Fortnite creator Epic shouts out a group of fan devs “for their continued support in keeping the legacy alive”
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 makes headshots deadlier while cutting back on weapon sway and recoil: “We will be keeping a close eye on sniper balance after this change”
As if The Outlast Trials couldn’t get any more deranged, the horror co-op game’s big new update adds more tooth guns and lady who lives in the walls
