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.
If it did, it would have just been throwing good money after bad.
But isn’t it featured in the list of games being given a short film via Secret Level? I kind of assumed the goal was to promote it via that episode and re-release the game around the same time.
Nothing to say they won’t - it’s actually pretty uncommon for the studio developing a live service to be the one supporting/maintaining it long term.
Fewer than 700 concurrent players means that they probably weren’t making enough money to keep the servers running, let alone bug fixes, or even development.
The Titanic was $200m. These mofos sank two.
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.
