$4 billion down the drain? *Concord* drags Sony into the quagmire

The most glaring issue isn’t really how much money was lost, but that the same high-risk mindset seems to still be continuing. For someone like me who has spent years immersed in indie games, this kind of decision-making feels especially awkward to watch—like when it should clearly be learning from Hades and taking fast, incremental steps, yet instead insists on gambling a sky-high budget on a single home run swing. Recently, overseas bloggers have been intensively discussing Sony Interactive Entertainment’s operational missteps in recent years, once again pushing the PlayStation brand into the center of controversy.

In this wave of debate, the title mentioned most often is Concord. According to the original source, rumors say the project’s failure directly caused losses on the scale of $400 million—a figure so large that it no longer feels like an ordinary project flop, but more like something went wrong across the entire chain of product judgment. What’s interesting is that what players are truly unhappy about may not just be the money lost itself, but that this kind of massive gamble seemingly failed to earn the corresponding market recognition.

Looking further ahead, the pressure on the books becomes even more staggering. The original text states that Sony spent $3.6 billion to acquire Bungie, while Lost Starship: Marathon—that is, Marathon—reportedly carries a development cost of around $250 million. If you add in the rumored losses from Concord, then just these core projects alone amount to a cumulative burn of as much as $4 billion, which many commentators have regarded as one of the most expensive strategic blunders in gaming history.

What concerns me most here isn’t the old saying that “even major companies make mistakes,” but rather that Sony in recent years seems to have fallen into a cycle where the bigger the budget, the higher the risk, and the more homogeneous the direction becomes. In the indie scene, by contrast, the common approach is to first test the waters with a clear core mechanic, then gradually scale up—like Celeste, which polished a single set of action design to perfection, or Undertale, which broke through the conversation with low-cost creativity. Of course, big companies can’t copy that approach outright, but at the very least they should understand that the market is no longer as willing to buy into the formula that “high investment equals high return.”

Right now, the core sentiment in the player community is still disappointment. The original text even uses a sharply worded phrase like “the ultimate display of managerial incompetence,” which shows that the mood has gone beyond ordinary complaints and become a direct challenge to management’s judgment. Unfortunately, even after the disastrous failure of Concord, Sony still seems to be pushing forward with similar high-risk projects, and that is what unsettles outside observers the most.

If we treat this as part of a broader industry trend, I actually think it offers a reverse lesson for small and mid-sized teams: what is truly scarce today is no longer budget, but clear product judgment and the ability to capture player interest. $4 billion can buy a lot of visuals, a lot of marketing, and a lot of organizational structure—but it cannot necessarily buy a game that people genuinely want to stay with. For PlayStation, what matters more now than continuing to double down may be stopping first and thinking clearly about how exactly to avoid the next Concord.

As a player, I still hope Sony won’t put all its energy into these make-or-break projects. What the platform truly needs is not just another blockbuster that can trend on social media, but also more mid-sized titles with distinctive styles—games willing to take creative risks while keeping costs under control. After all, the ones that move people most today are often not the most expensive ones, but the ones that understand best why they are fun.