Concord Steam DB concurrent player data

Former Dragon Age director Mark Darrah recently explained why he believes it is very possible that Sony and Firewalker Studios could have blown $400 million developing Concord.

A screenshot from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios

Darrah’s comments come in the wake of a rumor from Colin Moriarty claiming that a Concord insider informed him “that  Concord cost about $400 million to make.

Moriarty went on to reveal that ProbablyMonsters, the original owner of Firewalk Studios and Concord before selling to PlayStation Studios, Sony, and the game’s original investors had spent $200 million on the game before it even made it to its Alpha state.

He said, “Up to the point of the game went to Alpha state they had already spent $200 million on it. And it’s unclear how much of that money is from ProbablyMonsters and the original investors into the game, and how much of that was from Sony.”

A screenshot from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios

Next, he shared, “When the game had $200 million spent on it and was basically in an Alpha form in Quarter 1 of 2023 from that point until the game launched Sony spent another $200 million on it.”

“The scuttlebutt behind the scenes about Concord is that the game was in a laughable shape when it was shown, basically when the Alpha was ready to go.” he continued. “It was in such horrible shape that Sony felt they needed to spend that much money again. So 200 + 200 to get the game to the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) status. Not to the status of it being a great game. To get it to just viability.”

“A major expense was to urgently outsource much of the game to other studios to finish building the game out,” he shared. “And that two fundamental games were not worked on at all up to the point in which the game was shown in Alpha: onboarding, nothing about that. There was nothing about how players make their character all that kind of stuff or choose their character and get there. And monetization. Two very expensive, very specific and boutique things that happen to games like this.”

A screenshot from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios

Darrah reacted to this rumor and shared his analysis in a recent YouTube upload where he said, “If we start from a pure development perspective, we don’t include any externalities, then the easiest way to look at this is from a pure staff month perspective. Could we have spent $400 million just on staff?”

“That’s not a perfect way to do the math because obviously, you have other external factors, but it’s a pretty good indication,” he added. “If we can get even close then it’s at least possible that Concord did in fact cost $400 million.”

From there, Darrah explained how he broke up the game’s development beginning in 2018 when Firewalk Studios was founded and going up until April 30th, 2023 when it entered Alpha. He noted that the game spent 63 months in pre-Alpha and 15 months from Alpha until launch.

Next, Darrah assumed that Firewalk spent $15,000 per month on staff including “all of their supplies and computers, office space. Additionally, it would include any central resources that aren’t factored into the team. So HR.”

He even speculated that “$15,000 for a fully loaded staff month might actually be low.”

A screenshot from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios

READ: PlayStation Removes ‘Concord’ Downloads From Players’ PlayStation 5 Consoles

From there Darrah explained that in order to get to Moriarty’s $200 million before Alpha and then $200 million after Alpha number, Firewalk would need an average team size of 212 employees pre-Alpha and then scale up to around 900 after Alpha.

He shared, “It’s possible if we do it purely through staffing with just a fairly simple ramp.”

A screenshot from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios

Next, he decided to change up the costs and estimated that ProbablyMonsters spent around $25 million between 2016-2018 before creating Firewalk Studios given developer statements that the game was in development for 8 years.

Darrah also added $6 million, which he described as “sunk costs,” but explained it could be Sony or Firewalk hiding costs for other projects that employees might be working on that do not necessarily have anything to do with Concord, but are placed in the Concord because the game is seen as too big to fail.

He also applied an estimated $100 million acquisition of Firewalk Studios by Sony into the $400 million total despite Moriarty making it clear that the $400 million was the game’s development outside of Sony’s acquisition of Firewalk.

Nevertheless, with these new numbers this lowered his average pre-Alpha team size to 130 and the average team during and after Alpha would be 650. He noted that this is “super duper within the realm of possibility.”

A screenshot of the character Lark from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios

Interestingly, Darrah noted before he started crunching numbers he thought the rumor was “not even remotely plausible that Concord cost $400 million.”

However, he noted, “But when I sat down and did the math, especially once you start applying in a few externalities for cost, yeah, it actually does start to look like that number makes a lot of sense.”

He even notes that there could be higher costs such as increased staff salaries, building costs, or others.

A screenshot from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios

He then shared, “You can start to see how a project that runs as long as this one did with a team as big as it sounds like they had can start to get really expensive.”

As for whether it did cost $400 million, he speculated, “I’m not sure. I think we can make it plausible that it did. Certainly, for a game with this relatively small scope it’s hard to see where all of that money went. It would have 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 the sources providing this number are exaggerating, or misinformed, or getting their math wrong in some other way.”

“So I’m certainly a lot more willing to believe this number than I was before I started this exercise, I still don’t know for sure that $400 million is the actual number,” he concluded.

A screenshot from Concord (2024), Firewalk Studios

What do you make of Darrah’s analysis that lends credence to the fact that Sony, Firewalk Studios, and ProbablyMonsters spent $400 million to develop Concord?