Originally published at: Sony blew $400m on "the next Star Wars" and it flopped
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The juxtaposition of that particular image, of a character apparently looking straight upwards - and possibly talking to someone - with the brilliant Beschizzean analysis of project management failings that follows, reminds me of the this classic joke, an old fave:
https://www.gluckman.com/harry/engineermanager.htm
In fact IIRC XKCD riffed on this theme with its Cory Doctorow “balloon blogger” character back in the day?
Edit: corrected XKCD “spelling”
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There’s a longstanding IT story where the project manager asks the team, “How’s the product?” They reply “This is a crock of shit and it stinks to high heaven!” The department manager comes to the project manager and asks “how’s the product?” The project manager replies “It is a container of excrement and the effulgence is mighty strong.” The Senior Manager asks the Department Manager, who says “It contains that which promotes growth and strong it is.” The Senior Manager is asked by the CEO and replies “This product will promote the growth of the company.” And the CEO saw that it was good.
Nothing changes much, only the size of the product investment.
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From what I’ve seen, the game itself isn’t even bad enough to be interesting. It’s ehh… ok looking?
It’s main sin is being utterly unasked for and unwanted. It’s a marketing guys fantasy of a sucessful franchise, an archytypal case of the tail wagging the dog.
That said, im not sure I beleave the $400 million tag, that just strikes me as some creative accountancy.
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What really puzzles me about the situation is how to square the accounts of an internally disastrous culture with the fact that Sony walked in and bought the whole shop, project and team, in early 2023; pretty much exclusively for that project(Firewalk not having done much of anything else since 2018).
It wouldn’t at all surprise me if there was someone at Sony with what they politely refer to as ‘an action bias’ that allowed his desire to be a decisive deal-maker to silence his desire to be a cautious doer of due diligence; but the process still would have required both a distinctly dysfunctional development process and a profoundly blinkered acquisition operation on the Sony side; even at the point where Sony was an outside party dealing with a comparatively tiny studio that they could have freely rolled their eyes at and walked away laughing.
Either of those, independently, would be unremarkable enough; but both is a little bit more of a coincidence; especially if Concord is the only failure on such a dramatic scale. If Sony really had the eager puppy of M&A off the leash you wouldn’t expect him to necessarily bring back just one suspect project.
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See also: Bungie.
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I once spent most of a year working on a software product for a large company. They were literally at the stage of pressing the gold CD master that would be used for distribution to customers, when the plug was pulled, and it never shipped. They decided there was no market for it, or an insufficient market. Talk about a failure of product management. Product managers are supposed to know the market, and direct a team to build something customers will like and choose to buy, on time and on budget. Note also: it is real expensive to kill something after development is over: you have spent all the cost and gotten no revenue.
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The grave of a failed project is a good place to bury other costs. And once the movie-music industry account-o-mancers get involved…
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Bungie definitely seems to be in a similar vein; though less dramatic(at least in terms of pure narrative whiplash; it’s possible that Sony considers whatever writedowns have happened on the $3.6 billion for Bungie to be a bigger deal; my mind is only partially capable of emulating suitthink, especially without full information access).
Whoever blithely assumed that the results from Destiny would ensure that Destiny 2 would make line go up eternally assumed badly; but they were both buying a company with a track record and structured the acquisition to leave Bungie as an independent subsidiary with Sony having the option to assume more direct control if Bungie fails to make numbers(with much of the Destiny 2 related scrambling and axe-happy HR apparently being local management attempting to avoid the sort of interaction with the Japanese head office that 80s cyberpunk was full of).
Firewalk, apparently, managed to go from “randos with a basically broken project nobody had ever heard of” to “you are a pillar of the playstation strategy” at astonishing speed.
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None of this feels particularly surprising, nor does it require a dysfunctional workplace to end up in this situation - it’s part of the fundamental dysfunction of AAA development.
Wikipedia is unreliable for budget numbers, I find (lots of apples and oranges comparisons in their stats). The very big franchises are reportedly spending significantly more than that now, for combined development and marketing - the recent outings in the GTAs and CODs, etc. are probably more in the vicinity of a billion dollars (with some exceeding that). But those are the latest iterations of games that previously got billions of dollars in sales - they’re pretty safe bets. (Until they’re not, and the publisher maybe loses a quarter billion dollars-plus when sales are a bit weak.)
And this is the problem with AAA development - if someone wants to break in with a new IP, they have to spend that kind of money (because they’ll need to spend even more on marketing than an existing franchise with name recognition and a fan base). But the nature of AAA games is that they have to play it safe, which means making a more polished version of an existing game that doesn’t get “too weird” or unfamiliar or uncomfortable, which means it’s inherently going to be essentially somewhat mediocre. Especially for a new game, where it’ll be Frankensteining the popular bits of popular games (and other bits of pop culture, e.g. movies) into a new, yet entirely familiar, shape.
It’s hard to make games. It’s very hard to make good games - it’s often not really clear what’s working and what’s not until the game is finished (and it’s too late to do anything different). AAA has the additional problem of trying to guess what a popular game will be - which changes between when the game starts development and when it’s released. (E.g. it tries to ride the coattails of a popular game, but the trend is fully spent by the time it comes out.) The AAA game aims to make a highly polished, fundamentally mediocre game that will resonate with a future audience, but no one in development really knows what that will be. On top of which you have the sunk cost issues - developers have spent years of their lives (often to the detriment of everything else) working on a game they want to be good, the suits have invested a lot of money they don’t want to have wasted, etc.
Which, in a nutshell, is any (new) AAA game.
The game industry hasn’t discovered (/can’t manage) Hollywood-style creative accounting - they really do just spend obscene amounts of money to get things made and marketed.
It’s not so surprising in the context of a game industry where most of it is a disaster, really.
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Given that Sony is a Japanese company dedicated to the promotion of continuous improvement (Kaizen), which requires that process and product flaws be exposed, confronted, and eliminated continuously throughout its development, this is a pretty big surprise. Whose fictitious house of quality was this game based on?
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It really does feel like a transition in the industry. AAA games seem to be imploding under their own weight, whilst smaller scale productions (‘A’ games?) are catching people’s imagination with their riskier formulas. Is the games industry likely to go back to spreading its bets?
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Smaller publishers, definitely.
Anybody public? Not a chance. They need a moonshot to satisfy the street.
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Before any neckbeards stumble into the comments somehow and blame DEI or whatever bullshit, everyone outside of that studio and Sony thought these character designs looked like ass including to the eyes of queer folk and people of color. Overwatch did all of this back in 2016 but with actual character design and a bold artistic style m’kay.
So now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the actual problems around Concord, it’s studio and Sony.
It’s Bungie. Plain and simple.
Even as a big Destiny fan i’ll admit that series might have been one of the worst things to happen to gaming and it’s industry. Everyone thought if they copied D2, they will print money. Even Bungie couldn’t keep up the the quality going into Destiny’s 10th anniversary and yearly expansion sales plummeted hard. A lot of that goodwill was lost when they let PVP languish. How that happened? A large number of their PVP team left to start Firewalk… the studio that made Concord. A lot of their corporate culture carried over from Bungie with some fresh nonsense sprinkled on top.
Not only did Sony acquire Firewalk, it’s 200 million debt from Concord’s development and throw in another 200 million on top of that; they bought Bungie for 3.6 billion dollars to not only make Games As A Service (GaaS) games but to also teach their other studios how to make GaaS games. Sony wanted to make 12 GaaS games, half of them got canned and the other half are in serious trouble. Sony also had the absolutely brilliant idea to use Helldivers 2 to push PC users to get PSN accounts… which are basically banned in like 40% of the world forcing Sony to take a financial hit dealing with all of the refunds from Steam.
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Sort of like how Google was dedicated to the idea of not being evil? 
Sony is now an international conglomerate, and are therefore subject to the very same profit-driven ideology, whatever they might say… 
Capitalism drives the same path these days.
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It seems to be getting to the point where if they want to increase profits, their going to have to stop making games entirely and get into something more suitable, like real estate or gambling…
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Shame on Sony. My Honda is still pushing toward 250k miles without any evidence of significant decline.
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Honestly it’s a mix of japanese and western at this point so kaizen doesn’t apply that much. Sony gutted their japanese game studios that released quite a lot of well received AA games with what’s left of it to found Studio Asobi made up of western former staff members.
Sony made a very risky bet on western AAA studios and it’s biting them in the butt pretty hard. A ton of people joke about the PS5 being the best place to play PS4 games because AAA quality languished so much and more than half of PS4 owners haven’t moved over to the PS5. If Nintendo and Valve doesn’t pull off a miracle next year, it’s a possibility gaming might face a huge crash because of Sony and Microsoft’s stupidity.
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Kaizen is a pretty helpful antidote to people treating “we’ve always done it that way” as a presumptively good argument; but you actually have to know what is a flaw and what would be an improvement to keep it from degenerating into frantic churn or outright sabotage-as-policy-but-with-endless-goddamn-powerpoints-about-‘KPIs’.
Sony hardware has historically reflected the touch of someone who knew what flaws and improvements were (albeit deeply compromised by the split loyalties of a company that both made products for media playback and made media for people it hated and treated as presumptive pirates; and by the hubris of people who seemed to think that a little outsourcing to the Chinese around the edges, or increasingly marginal superiority to the South Koreans, shouldn’t be any impediment to significant price differences); but Sony software? I’m not sure that they even register as ‘at or above average’; and software is an area where ‘average’ is abjectly terrible by the standards of quite a few other areas of technical endeavor.
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They seem to have looked at GAAS hits and seen that they’re highly profitable, but have overlooked the fact that you can’t just push out more of the same and see the same result. GAAS games that are popular depend on taking up a lot of their players time and attention to keep them paying and playing month after month, so any new game following the same model must find a new group of dedicated players, or rip them away from an existing game, hence the extreme marketing budgets. Sony has just discovered that the market isn’t big enough for 12 more copies of GTA or Overwatch, because there aren’t enough people to play them all.
If you look at the amount of microtransactions and lootbox mechanics that a lot of games are stuffed with today, then they’ve already got the gambling part locked down. Unless that was your point, in which case, consider me whooshed.
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