Concord, Firewalk Studio’s ill-fated live service shooter (which announced it was closing its doors less than a month after its release) will reportedly still get its episode of Prime Video’s Secret Level—which, given the turbulence of the industry we’ve been reporting on this past year, seems grimly appropriate.
For the uninitiated—Secret Level is an anthology series that’ll be following 15 different games, one episode a piece, telling their stories in a celebration of videogame culture as a whole. The IPs listed include Armoured Core, Dungeons & Dragons, Sifu, The Outer Worlds, Warhammer 40,000 and, of course, Concord.
That’s a fact that PC Gamer’s own Tyler Colp acutely realised in the immediate aftermath, with a proportionate wince. Now, as IGN’s reported, speaking to a “source close to production”: Concord’s episode will almost definitely still be featured in the anthology.
I don’t have any particular stake in Concord as a game, per se—I didn’t really have time for another live service in my life, being strung as I am between Deadlock, Final Fantasy 14, and World of Warcraft. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? I mean this with every kindness to the hard work that went into Concord, and my usual degree of frustration to see so much hard work wasted, but it feels like an awful lot of money is getting poured into an already cutthroat genre.
That’s not to say Concord was a maligned darling—our own review wasn’t particularly kind to it—but I don’t think anybody wants to see a game with even a glimmer of potential shut down less than an MMO patch cycle after its release.
Still, there’s a part of me that’s glad this episode is still likely airing. For one, it means that the people who put work into Concord’s character designs, world, and story still get some enduring evidence that they did that work—well, Amazon could always pull Secret Level in the far-flung future, but that’s another facet of our digital-only hellscape I don’t have the existential bandwidth to get into.
Moreover, it makes Secret Level more interesting as a piece of media. If it’s supposed to be celebrating games (in an industry already marked with the gravestones of games like Anthem) then Concord being given an episode, launching, and shutting down before that episode could even air almost stops Secret Level’s exercise from being saccharine in its own, accidental way.
That’s maybe a little cynical. I don’t think Secret Level is inherently bad, or that its episodes’ll just be a corporate pat on the back. There’s every chance that it’ll have some great stories in it, and I’m excited to see some of my favourite settings told in interesting and unique ways—it’s just, you know, hard to turn my brain off and objectively enjoy the spectacle. Because of the horrors.
At the very least, I’m glad viewers in the know won’t be able to sit through the entirety of Secret Level, marvelling at how cool the mechs of Armoured Core look, and stay blissfully unaware of the fact that this games industry has wastage—as in games vanishing because there’s no legal requirement to keep them available, or historic layoffs and studio closures causing disillusionment among its talent. Concord’s place in this lineup is an unavoidable reminder that we lose access to games (which, good or bad, ought to be preserved in some way) just as fast as we get them.
That being said, it’s not as if Concord is gonna stay buried, necessarily, but still. It’s likely that, when Secret Level comes out, one of its episodes will be gravestone in an otherwise celebratory victory lap—and I’m not sure we deserved anything else.
