Will Marathon Survive?

[Mnementh]

DekutheEvilClown said:

Mnementh said:

What are you saying? You answer "that is not true" to the claim that there was not much hate pre-launch. Then you go on debunking a completely different claim.

The $400M number came from Colin Moriarty (a playstation supporter throughout the years) and was repeated through classical media:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/21/new-report-says-sonys-concord-cost-400-million-to-make/
That is a case that we don't know internal numbers and have to rely on internal sources. That number was misleading, as it included the studio acquisition cost. These numbers got mixed up and lead to the $400M figure. It wasn't a case of made up information, it was a case of misinterpreting the sparse sources of information that make it out.

And about that the game was mostly met with desinterest: we were there! I really didn't even heard about the game (and I am not exactly disconnected) until it was reported that the numbers were low. And then - after that was known - the dunking started. Not before.

I'm talking about the part quoted clearly. About Sony expecting it to be a massive multimedia franchise. There is absolutely no evidence they had any significant expectations for it considering the studio size, and therefore budget, was low and the marketing was nothing special.

The $400m number is just a completely fabricated number with no basis in reality that only one single person ever claimed. It doesn't include the studio acquisition because that would have cost almost nothing considering they had exactly one game and Sony owned it. It would have amounted to something more like reimbursing ProbablyMonsters for all their costs incurred in funding the project initially and then a premium on top.

You quoted "People didn't hate Concord. They were apathetic." Yeah, you also did quote the big IP stuff.

And the budget number wasn't totally made up, it derived from real costs. Moriarty relied on an internal source, as Schreier and Dring do. And yeah, that number came to be because of acquisition and also the initial contract for the game was 200M$:

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/10/concord-cost-sony-over-usd200-million-and-didnt-make-a-single-cent

Add this and the acquisition and you have 300M$ plus the additional expenses to bring it to the finish and you arrive at around 400M$. Obviously this is a bad calculation if you really need to know the actual cost for production, but these numbers are all internal. So it gets mixed up with the publishing contract and the acquisition mid development and you arrive at massive numbers. The real costs were probably much lower. But that 400M$ wasn't coming from thin air, it was just badly attributed. Which is the result as we cannot see the actual books.