Dragon Age veteran crunches the numbers on Concord's reported $400 million cost: "A project that is in trouble can get really big in an effort to get it over the finish line"

BioWare veteran Mark Darrah has crunched the numbers on whether Concord's reported $400 million development costs are accurate, essentially concluding that it's entirely possible and plausible that it did.

In a new episode of his 'Mark Darrah on Games' podcast, the former Dragon Age executive producer precedes his analysis by reminding folks that he isn't an employee of Sony and thus can't base anything off of inside information. That said, he looks at publicly available data including Concord's development start date in 2018, as well as its 15 months in alpha, to form a rough estimate.

Darrah also estimates the "fully loaded staff month", that is how much it cost Sony to keep every member of Concord's development team on staff, to be $15,000 a month. That doesn't mean developers were making that much every month, but Darrah is estimating that each employee cost Sony that much in wages, supplies, hardware, office space, and also indirect costs including HR. He's also using that number in an effort to see whether Concord's reported $400 million development cost is even plausible, and according to his estimations, it is.

"A project that is in trouble can get really big in an effort to get it over the finish line," Darrah said. "So with those two numbers. 212 people on average, up until alpha, and 900 from alpha until launch, we get a grand total cost of about 402 million dollars. So, it's possible, if we do it purely through staffing with just a fairly simple ramp."

That 400 million claim has been pretty widely countered by journalists and fan analyses, but Darrah's equally comprehensive investigation proves, in his mind, that it's at the very least plausible that Sony spent that much on a game that it pulled offline two weeks after launch.

"Did it cost 400 million dollars? I'm not sure, I think we can make it plausible that it did. Certainly for a game with as relatively small scope, it's hard to see where all of that money went. It would've had to have been lost in iteration. It would have had to have been lost in inefficiencies due to team structure or massive team sizes. Like we just went through I think you can make the math work, and it might represent reality. It's also possible that the sources that are providing this number are exaggerating, or misinformed, or are getting their math wrong in some other way."

Darrah announced his retirement from BioWare back in December 2020 after 23 years with the company, so although he presumably has zero insight into Sony's finances beyond what's available publicly, he does know a thing or two about game development costs. Still, the exact dollar amount of Sony's financial loss from Concord, which was in development for around eight years, is yet unknown.

Meanwhile, here are the best PS5 games you can play today.