The Veteran developer Mark Darrahknown for working on the Dragon Age series with BioWare, he defined it as plausible that Concord cost a total of 400 million dollars. He isn’t sure, of course, but he doesn’t see anything as impossible. His comments came in the latest episode of his podcast, “Mark Darrah on Games,” in which he shares his insider perspective on the video game industry and the world of development.
Darrah, who has served as executive producer several times in his 23 years at the Mass Effect company, and who therefore has some expertise on the “development costs” issue, began his analysis by reminding everyone that he is not an employee of Sony and that therefore what he would have said would not have been based on internal information. After due background, he examined Concord’s public data, including its development start date, which falls in 2018, and its 15 months in alpha, finally making a rough estimate.
The numbers add up
Darrah estimated how much it cost Sony to keep each member of the development teamtalking about about 15,000 dollars a month. We would like to point out that the figure is not only made up of the salary, but of the overall costs which include wages, hardware expenses, spaces occupied in the offices, indirect costs and more. It is from this estimate that he went so far as to define Concord’s 400 million as plausible.
“A struggling project can drive up costs as you try to get it to the end,” Darrah explained. “With those numbers, 212 people on average up to alpha, and 900 from alpha up to launch, we get a total cost of about $402 million. So it’s plausible, if we just look at the staff and some simplified numbers.”
The 400 million have been disputed by many. Darrah he is not sure that the figure is correctbut his calculations tell him it’s plausible, which makes it all the more impressive that the game was pulled two weeks after launch due to poor sales.
“Did it cost $400 million? I’m not sure, but I think I can say it’s plausible that it did.” Darrah added, however, that “It is also possible that the sources who provided this data are exaggeratingare uninformed or are miscalculating.”
In short, let’s reiterate: Darrah does not say that Concord certainly cost 400 million dollars, but only that it is plausible that it could have cost that much, starting from the cost estimates per individual Firewalk Studios employee.
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