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"

GamesFPSConcordDragon 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"When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works. GamesFPSConcordDragon 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"When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Firewalk Studios) 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. “A project that is in trouble can get really big in an effort to get it over the finish line,” Darrah said. “So with those two numbers. 212 people on average, up until alpha, and 900 from alpha until launch, we get a grand total cost of about 402 million dollars. So, it’s possible, if we do it purely through staffing with just a fairly simple ramp.” “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.” Darrah announced his retirement from BioWare back in December 2020 after 23 years with the company, so although he presumably has zero insight into Sony’s finances beyond what’s available publicly, he does know a thing or two about game development costs. Still, the exact dollar amount of Sony’s financial loss from Concord,which was in development for around eight years, is yet unknown. 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