Fans are always curious to peer inside the mind of companies and developers alike to get an idea of what mindset they operate under. In the case of the ill fated title, Concord, Industry veteran Colin Moriarty claims to have spoken with a developer from Firewalk who allegedly stated that Concord cost around $400 million to develop and that it was meant to be “the future of PlayStation” with an impact on par with Star Wars. This comes along with additional information that director of Concord, Ryan Ellis, has also stepped down from his role as a director and will be taking up a supporting role with Firewalk.
After spending around 8 years in development, Concord was revealed to have an absurdly low player peak of just 660 players and was assumed to be an overall monetary loss for the company. It has now been revealed by Moriarty that the Firewalk spent around $200 million pre PlayStation buy-out and Sony invested around $200 million more after this buyout. With the game only reportedly selling 25,000 copies. This forced Sony’s hand as it announced just two weeks after its release that they would be shutting Concord down and refunding all copies of the game going.
Ryan deeply believed in that project and bringing players together through the joy in it…Regardless of there being things that could have been done differently throughout development…he’s a good human, and full of heart.
Above is what a former developer on Concord say about the stepping down of former director, Ryan Ellis when speaking to Kotaku. It is unclear as of now what role Ellis will be shifting into after stepping down.