Unfortunately, nice doesn't shift product.
In the lead-up to Amazon’s upcoming Secret Level series that will turn 15 games into animated shorts, producer Tim Miller sat down with Rolling Stone to discuss one of the most infamous entries, Concord, and how its downfall may have affected the show.
“There was no nicer, more invested group of developers than the team on Concord,” Miller says. “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.”
Players and critics have been dissecting why Concord didn’t work out before Sony even announced that it was shutting down servers. I spent some time messing around with game modes and flicking through the cosmetics and customisations that Concord had to offer before it went offline, and throughout all of it, my biggest problem was that it was just ok. But for $40/ £35, Concord was never going to survive by just being a half-decent shooter in such a flooded market.
Helldivers 2 managed to do well even with an upfront payment of $40/ £35, but that’s because it offered players more than just the ability to unlock cosmetics for free; it gave people a new experience that they couldn’t get elsewhere. But playing Concord, on the other hand, felt indistinguishable from other hero shooters.
Games don’t always have to stand out from the crowd, but I always thought that choosing not to go free-to-play killed Concord before it could even find its footing. It stopped potential players from checking it out on a whim and, in doing so, drastically limited its player count. I struggled to find a game in Concord’s launch week with ridiculously low player counts that saw an all-time high of just 607 on Steam. Even in the last few days, when everyone was throwing themselves off cliffs for XP, there were just 35 players playing alongside me.
“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,” Miller says. “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.”
The timing certainly isn’t great with Concord launching and then shutting down so close to Secret Level’s release, but that doesn’t seem to be a massive issue for the TV series. During the interview with Rolling Stone, Miller points out that other entries also don’t come from the most lively franchises. Both Mega Man and Unreal Tournament don’t seem to have a lot in the pipeline, so it’s not like this is a requirement for all the videogames involved.
Miller even goes on to say that he hopes Secret Level can work in some way to jump-start new projects or, at the very least, shine some light on older franchises. This may include inspiring some devs to continue work on old projects or dormant series, even if that means using the groundwork and stories that Secret Level will set out.
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