Sometimes a great TV tie-in can give a game a popularity boost—The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 both got Netflix bumps—but it doesn’t seem likely that an upcoming TV short based on the world of Concord will have the same effect, given that the hero shooter can’t even be purchased anymore. Sony and developer Firewalk are taking Concord offline this week after a dismal player turnout; it didn’t even crack 1,000 concurrents on Steam.
In a deal that must’ve happened well before any of us even knew about Concord, however, Sony secured its inclusion in upcoming Prime Video anthology series Secret Level, whose 15 episodes are each inspired by a different game or games. The series will premiere this December.
Firewalk says it’s going to “explore options” for bringing Concord back, but games that are completely un-launched like this often don’t return, and Concord may join the graveyard where Anthem, Crucible, and Artifact are interred.
That might make the Secret Level episode a bit of an awkward watch. Surely it was conceived of and written with the belief that Concord would be somewhat popular by the time it aired, or at the very least still exist. The sci-fi shooter’s characters were meant to be one of its big draws; Firewalk planned weekly cutscenes about their space adventures.
Even before it launched for $40, Concord struggled to get players into its free open beta, so I think it’s safe to say that the characters and world failed to ignite imaginations. Their realistically rendered faces have been interpreted as bland up against the cartoony mugs of Overwatch characters, and my take is that they all seem so nice that it’s hard to imagine them getting into gunfights.
But that’s just part of Concord’s problem. As I wrote last week, its lineage and competitive hooks—former Destiny 2 devs doing arena and objective modes with an emphasis on strategic character switching—clearly didn’t snag any subset of contemporary competitive shooter players. I liked aspects of Concord, but the Overwatch crowd didn’t go for it, the Counter-Strike crowd didn’t go for it, and the Call of Duty crowd didn’t go for it, at least not in any serious numbers.
Maybe it’ll make for popular TV, though? That’s the sort of dramatic irony I’ve come to expect from games, and I can already picture what the response will be if the episode turns out to be a banger: “Why didn’t Sony show us this?”
