Concord
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Documents about Concord
PlayStation's Live-Service Initiative Could Not Have Gone Worse
PlayStation’s strategic pivot toward live-service gaming, initiated around 2020–2021 with the goal of launching a dozen such titles by 2026, has largely failed to yield the intended results.
- Sony's live-service initiative, which aimed to launch a dozen live-service titles by 2025-2026, has largely failed, resulting in significant resource depletion and the cancellation of multiple high-profile projects.
- Guerrilla Games has rebooted 'Horizon Hunters: Gathering' following poor performance in playtests conducted throughout 2026, casting doubt on the project's future.
- Naughty Dog canceled its 'The Last of Us' online project in 2023 to avoid the long-term resource trap of becoming a dedicated live-service studio.
Bungie's Layoffs: The End of an Era?
The recent restructuring at Bungie, characterized by a significant reduction in workforce, marks a critical turning point for the studio following its 2022 acquisition by Sony.
- Bungie has reduced its workforce by approximately 600 positions since its 2022 acquisition by Sony, including a recent round of 400 layoffs that cut nearly 40% of the remaining staff.
- Sony recorded a $766 million impairment charge related to Bungie for fiscal year 2025, indicating that the original integration strategy has failed to meet financial expectations.
- The acquisition thesis—that Bungie would lead Sony's live service initiatives—failed because Bungie’s high-cost expansion model proved incompatible with the microtransaction-heavy frameworks Sony intended to implement.
Why Video Games Cost So Much To Make
The primary driver behind the ballooning budgets of modern AAA video games is the sustained, high-cost labor required for long-term development cycles.
- Modern AAA game budgets now frequently range from $300 million to $500 million due to the combination of extended five-year development cycles and large team sizes.
- The monthly burn rate per employee in major tech hubs has risen from approximately $10,000 in the mid-2010s to between $15,000 and $20,000 today.
- A 400-person team working over a five-year development window results in hundreds of millions of dollars in costs, with minor fluctuations potentially pushing totals toward the $1 billion threshold.
Why Destiny Died (RIP 2014-2026)
The Destiny franchise, which launched in 2014, is effectively concluding its active development cycle as Bungie transitions Destiny 2 into a maintenance-only state following a final update in June 2026.
- Bungie is ending development on Destiny 2 and initiating significant layoffs following the conclusion of the franchise's long-term content roadmap.
- The development of a potential Destiny 3 has been deemed financially unviable due to the exponential rise in AAA game production budgets, which now far exceed the $500 million investment Activision originally committed to the franchise in 2010.
- Bungie’s transition from an independent studio to a Sony subsidiary in 2022 for $3.6 billion occurred during a period of zero-interest rates, but the studio has since struggled to maintain player engagement as the market for live-service games became increasingly saturated.
Golden TWIG 2025: Gaming's Real Awards Show
The gaming industry in 2025 is defined by a stark divergence between the scaling success of platform-based ecosystems and the systemic instability of traditional high-budget publishing.
- Roblox has become a primary industry growth engine, recording a 70% year-over-year increase in daily active users and challenging traditional high-budget publishing models.
- Established publishers including Ubisoft, Warner Bros. Games, and Amazon Game Studios are experiencing significant commercial and reputational erosion, while high-budget titles like Concord and Splitgate 2 have failed to meet modern player expectations.
- Market success is increasingly driven by smaller-budget titles with innovative mechanics, such as Clover Pit and Animal Company, rather than the speculative, high-capital models that led to instability at firms like Forte, Bungie, Dream Haven, and TheoryCraft.
Sony Reigns in Bungie, Battlefield’s Beta Booms, Nintendo Stays Nintendo | Games For Breakfast
The gaming industry is currently navigating a period of significant strategic realignment, marked by aggressive corporate consolidation and shifting consumer sentiment.
- Sony has officially ended Bungie's independent status, signaling that the developer will no longer receive the special elevated treatment it was granted following its acquisition three years ago.
- Sony's live-service title Concord reportedly cost between $200 million and $400 million to produce but generated only $1 million in revenue, leading the company to downplay its live-service portfolio during recent shareholder meetings.
- Nintendo is surveying customer sentiment regarding its new 'game key cards,' which function as physical license keys rather than containing actual game data, requiring users to download the full software.
🏆 The 2024 Golden TWIG Awards: an Unfiltered Gaming Industry Award Show
The 2024 gaming landscape is defined by a stark dichotomy between the resilience of agile, creative titles and the systemic failures of high-capital, venture-backed enterprises.
- The gaming industry experienced a significant contraction in 2024, resulting in approximately 14,600 layoffs as companies corrected for post-lockdown operational bloat and inflated valuations.
- Despite broader industry struggles, Steam reached a record-breaking 39.3 million peak concurrent users, demonstrating that consumer engagement remains high for platforms that successfully capture market demand.
- High-capital, venture-backed AAA projects are increasingly viewed as unsustainable, evidenced by the failure of titles like Concord and Squad Busters to achieve market fit despite massive development budgets.
Ubisoft is Falling Hard | 355
Major Western game publishers are currently facing a profound crisis of identity and financial sustainability, characterized by the collapse of high-budget projects and a growing disconnect between development strategies and consumer expectations.
- Ubisoft’s stock value has suffered a significant decline over the last five years due to a rigid, siloed development structure and a reliance on repetitive, formulaic open-world game designs.
- Sony’s Concord project serves as a critical example of financial failure, incurring estimated development costs of nearly $400 million while attempting to chase live-service trends without a clear strategic foundation.
- Western AAA publishers are currently trapped in an unsustainable cycle of prioritizing hyper-realistic graphical fidelity and bloated budgets over core gameplay innovation.
TWIG #297 Gamescom Confidential, Why Steam ain't Blocked by China and the TRUTH about Tim Hortons
Gamescom 2024 underscored a pivotal shift in the global gaming landscape, characterized by the aggressive expansion of major Asian publishers like NetEase, miHoYo, and Tencent into Western markets.
- Asian publishers like NetEase, miHoYo, and Tencent are creating high competitive barriers in Western markets, with miHoYo investing $200 million annually into live-ops resources.
- New game titles are struggling to gain traction, currently capturing only 8% of total player time, while Steam wishlist-to-sale conversion rates have dropped as low as 5%.
- Black Myth: Wukong achieved record-breaking sales of 10 million units in three days, though its success remains heavily concentrated within the Chinese domestic market.
Concord and AAA games Failure to Launch | 353
The contemporary gaming landscape is defined by a crisis of identity and sustainability among high-budget AAA titles.
- The commercial failure of Concord highlights the inability of high-budget, premium-priced hero shooters to compete in a market saturated by established free-to-play titles like Overwatch and Marvel Rivals.
- Lengthy AAA development cycles are increasingly unsustainable, as they often result in derivative products that are disconnected from current market trends upon release.
- Industry success now relies on operational agility, the strategic use of recognizable intellectual property, and the integration of community feedback via early access rather than relying solely on massive development budgets.
TWiG #291 Valve Salaries, Leaked MiHoYo Strategy, and Failing Disney IPs!
The global video game industry is currently navigating a period of significant structural transition, characterized by shifting demographic preferences and the struggle to balance traditional monetization with emerging subscription models.
- The global video game industry is projected to grow from $200 billion in 2022 to $307 billion by 2027, driven primarily by Gen Alpha and Gen Z preferences.
- Valve’s 2021 operational data highlights extreme profitability, with a lean staff of 336 employees earning an average annual compensation of $1.32 million, though this model limits the company's ability to scale.
- Subscription-based models like Microsoft's Game Pass have yet to achieve the mass-market adoption necessary to replace traditional hardware-centric revenue strategies.
TWIG #285 Squad Busters Busted? Destiny 2, Too?
The gaming industry is currently defined by a tension between aggressive transmedia expansion and a fragile economic landscape characterized by studio closures and workforce reductions.
- The gaming industry is facing a business model crisis where cosmetic-only monetization often fails to generate sufficient revenue to sustain live-service operations for titles like Concord and Marvel Rivals.
- Supercell’s Squad Busters is experiencing a rapid decline in daily active users despite high lifetime download figures, driven by an over-reliance on pre-registration incentives and a user base skewed toward lower-revenue markets.
- Sony’s PlayStation 5 install base remains split evenly with the aging PlayStation 4, indicating a stagnant hardware upgrade cycle caused by bloated development costs and a lack of compelling software.
Companies behind it
As the documents state it.