Amazon’s Ill-Fated Concord Animation Shows ‘Potential of This World and Characters,’ Creator Says

Tim Miller, the chief creator of Amazon’s upcoming Prime Video animated anthology Secret Level, has spoken out for the first time on the series’ Concord episode, which comes out next month after Sony shut down not only the game, but its developer.

Concord, a live service hero shooter from Sony-owned Firewalk Studios, 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 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 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 within days of release. One estimate suggested it only sold around 25,000 copies.

Still, as confirmed by IGN, Secret Level’s Concord animation will launch as part of the anthology, now offering a glimpse at what might have been had the game itself been a success and continued to expand on its story.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Tim Miller, who was one of the driving forces behind Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots, 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.

What Miller doesn’t understand is why Concord ended up flopping so hard. “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 already made 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.”

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].