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Sony's PS5 video game Concord shuts down today. It was developed for 8 years by ~150 game developers, cost around $200,000,000 to make, yet only stayed online and playable for 15 days! It is said to have sold 25,000 copies in total (10k Steam + 15k PlayStation).

That means 194.5 days and 13.3 million USD were spent developing for each day the game could be experienced. That's about how much it would cost for a quarter of the United States to make meals at school free entirely.

Here is the total player count for each day according to SteamDB

24.08 | 607
25.08 | 420
26.08 | 299
27.08 | 267
28.08 | 241
29.08 | 198
30.08 | 178
31.08 | 151
01.09 | 120
02.09 | 119
03.09 | 132
04.09 | 68
05.09 | 54
06.09 | 45

That's a total of 2,899 people who even launched the game on Steam, but to be fair (and balanced) let's surmise PS5 stats from this:

2,899 Steam Players × 1.5x Sales ≈ 4,385 PS5 Players

So, add the two together and you get a total of ~7284 players (estimate) that have even launched this game in its 15 days existence.

You could've given each one of these players ~$27,500 for the same budget. If you've played this game, was it worth 27.5k? Because that's how much Sony spent on you enjoying it.

The entire development of Undertale cost $51,124, meaning the money spent on less than two Concord players could've been used to create a game played by over 6 million people (on Steam alone). You could've had around 4000 Undertales. But no, we needed another Hero shooter.

Omori had a budget of $203,300. Over one million copies sold.
Five Nights at Freddy's was developed with no budget. Over 4.74 million copies sold.

Stop. Doing. AAA. Games.
This. Economy. Distributes. Money. Wrong.