An Update from PlayStation Studios (Neon Koi and Firewalk Studios are closing)
An Update from PlayStation Studios (Neon Koi and Firewalk Studios are closing)
*Below is an internal email from Hermen Hulst, CEO, Studio Business Group, Sony Interactive Entertainment distributed today to SIE employees. ********************************************************************************** Dear Team, Today, I want to share some important updates from Sony Inte...
Neon Koi was developing a mobile action game. Firewalk Studios recently launched and quickly delisted Concord.
A dumpster fire of a situation. 8 years of development, $400 million reported budget, game shut down after 2 weeks and now the studio closed.
AAA gaming is a hot mess right now.
Both the development time and the budget have come in at a variety of different numbers with people refuting them, and I'll bet several of those figures depend on how you count. The range is now somewhere between 4-10 years, and $50-$400M, which is an absurd amount of variance, but even at 4 years and $50M, it's still probably too long and too much money to spend on a game that you don't know is going to find a substantial audience.
EDIT: Kotaku is reporting that the acquisition was $200M and did not cover all development costs, which lends credence to that report from Colin Moriarty claiming $200M pre and then $200M post acquisition for the figure of $400M.
Greatly appreciate the followup!
Concord/Firewalk is gonna be a running joke for years to come
I guess Concord isn't coming back as free-to-play then.
The Titanic was $200m. These mofos sank two.
And there won't even be a movie.
Concord's getting an episode on Secret Level
I was wondering why people were leaving the offices today ask solemn. Turned out the 2 floors above me were leased by firewalk. More room for the other gaming studio we're building out who was sub leasing them I guess.
Damn and I thought lawbreakers was bad
Lawbreakers was at least a good game.
The funny thing is, I hear that Concord at least worked on a basic level. It was visually high fidelity, guns worked, and it wasn’t terribly buggy, which is more than a lot of popular releases can say. But, of course, it offered nothing new and the character design was terrible.
I wish they open source all of it without support and documenation - just dump it into public space - make a torrent or push all to github but they will probably delete all and turn off the lights.
