Hate became an eye for an eye situation in gaming, and not only in gaming. People aren't staying silent or backing down like they used to. If one group throws what's seen as negative (or hateful) in another groups (general) direction, then that other group will now throw negativity (or hate) right back.

Its gone on for long enough now that it has in a way become a 'sport'. A sport like boxing, MMA, WWE, etc, where the main goal is to (seemingly) damage whoever you're up against as much as you can. Far worse, more and more are constantly looking for it and are ready to be on the offensive.

Yeah this. And the thing people need to understand is that it is not hate that leads to bad sales - it is apathy, desinterest. Why should anyone buy a game, if it doesn't spark emotions? We live in a time with so, so many games releasing all the time. We have a choice. We don't have to take the game that released and try to have fun, we can choose what looks interesting. Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Clair Obscur - these sparked instant interest and then as the gamers had the game in their hands could also follow through with a great game. So why choose anything less?

This is almost certainly not true. There was one source for this claim, a podcast that also claimed the game cost $400m to develop. That budget was debunked by Christopher Dring and Jason Schreier(pretty reliable sources). It is also a known fact that the budget for the game was $50m initially, through publicly available ProbablyMonsters investor material. Sony only owned the company for a small period of dev time and the studio was never bigger than 150 people(this would be ~$15m a year operation cost roughly for a big established dev, probably less here).

The Concord story is a lot less interesting when viewed through the lens of actual facts and legitimate information

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.

Sony paid for an episode of that Amazon show and it still aired after the game was pulled. That is spanning multi media. I never said anything about a budget. But it is clear Sony had huge plans for the IP.

Every single article about the budget sites that same one source. All those numbers you’re using are just random numbers with no meaning. The original budget was $50m. That part is a fact, and how much it ran over budget is unknown and random dudes that worked on the game wouldn’t have a clue how much it cost anyway. There is probably like a handful of people in the world that knows how much it actually cost, since you’d need access to pretty in-depth accounting data. Which is why all the claims of budget leaks by people from the dev team are always suspect, as programmers, writers etc. would absolutely not know how much most of these things cost.