Amazon’s Trailer for Its Concord Animation Is a Promo for a Game That No Longer Exists

Prime Video has released a trailer for its Concord animation, offering a first meaningful look at the Secret Level episode based on the disastrous PlayStation game.

The teaser, below, reveals a sci-fi short featuring characters that were not in the live service hero shooter at launch, and perhaps hints at what might have come to Concord in terms of additional heroes had it survived more than a few weeks. A narrator says “the galaxy was theirs for the taking,” inadvertently referencing Concord’s short-lived existence. The trailer ends with the following message to viewers: “Discover Concord.” Unfortunately there is no video game for them to explore afterwards.

Concord has gone down as one of the biggest flops in PlayStation history. Amid disastrously low player numbers, Sony hauled Concord offline just two weeks after launch. It eventually shuttered developer Firewalk and confirmed Concord wouldn’t return.

It has proved a costly failure for Sony. Concord’s initial development deal was around $200 million according to a report by Kotaku, which cited two sources familiar with the agreement. They said the $200 million was not enough to fund Concord’s entire development, nor did it include the purchase of the Concord IP rights or Firewalk Studios itself. Kotaku’s number aligns with an earlier report saying that ProbablyMonsters — Firewalk’s original parent company — raised $200 million in 2021.

It all points to Concord being seen as an ambitious project that was expected to attract a large audience. Instead it launched to tepid reviews and low interest, prompting PlayStation to pull the plug soon after. One estimate suggested it only sold around 25,000 copies.

Midia Research analyst Rhys Elliott told IGN shortly before Concord was shut down: “Pivoting to live services is high-risk, high-reward venture, and the risk is heightening to levels that might not be worth it for many AAA console/PC publishers that aren’t already active in the space.”

While Concord itself is no more, its Amazon animation survives as one of 15 episodes each devoted to video games. Earlier this month, Tim Miller, the chief creator of Secret Level, said he had no way of knowing what would happen to Concord during the three-year development of Secret Level, and insisted there was never a consideration to pull the Concord episode from the anthology.

“There was no nicer, more invested group of developers than the team on Concord,” he said. “I honestly don’t understand why it didn’t work. I know that they were trying to do the best they could, and they were a talented group of artists, so I feel terrible for that.”

While Concord was primarily a live service hero shooter, it had a stab at telling an overarching story through cinematic vignettes that were designed to go live over time and flesh out the game’s sci-fi universe and characters. Concord got through just a few of these cinematics before it was hauled offline, with the rest presumably consigned to the virtual scrap heap.

As it stands, Concord’s Secret Level episode may be the last Concord anything ever released, save potential leaks. Miller had some kind words for the developers at Firewalk if that does indeed end up being the case.

“I don’t feel bad that it’s a part of the show, because I think it’s an episode that turned out really well, and you can kind of see the potential of this world and the characters,” he said. “If it’s the remaining vestige of that product, I hope the developers feel that it’s in some way worthy, just a little bit, of the blood, sweat, and tears they put into it.”

Sony’s live service push has seen mixed results so far. Helldivers 2 is the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time with an incredible 12 million copies sold in just 12 weeks, but other live service games have fallen by the wayside. In December last year, Naughty Dog canceled a live service The Last of Us multiplayer game so it could focus on single-player games. Sony-owned developer Bungie, meanwhile, has suffered significant layoffs as a result of Destiny 2’s struggles. The failure of Concord and the closure of Firewalk is yet another troubling development for PlayStation live service.

In a recent financial call, Sony president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki said the company has learned lessons from both the record-breaking launch of Helldivers 2 earlier this year and Concord’s failure. On Concord specifically, Totoki said Sony should have run its development gates such as user testing or internal evaluation “much earlier than we did.”

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.