Update: players are now throwing themselves off cliffs to grind xp for the platinum trophy https://x.com/realradec/status/1831041419756388429
Update: players are now throwing themselves off cliffs to grind xp for the platinum trophy https://x.com/realradec/status/1831041419756388429
On one hand, this does sound plausible, but on the other hand, Concord is such a disaster that said C-Suit idiots might legitimately fear that the mere existence of its episode could overshadow the entire rest of the show. It might be cheaper and more sensible to just write one episode off and, if there is any hint of an overarching narrative, fix this with a few edits to other episodes and maybe some quickly recorded voice over to bridge any possible gaps.
I’ve worked for those idiots. In the streaming video industry. They do not think this or fear this and this is one of those rare cases where they’re not being idiots. People will hate watch the Concord episode of Secret Level. People will be curious about the episode because of the trainwreck that the game is. The social media buzz around Concord being gawdawful will put butts in seats. These guys are not wrong that there is no bad publicity, and they don’t need people to love the Concord episode of Secret Level for the series as a whole to hit their “hours streamed” benchmarks, sell a fuckton of ads, and have them call the whole thing a success so they can do it all again for Secret Level season 2 where they never speak of Concord again.
What’s more, they don’t even care if the Concord episode is good, they care that you watched another 30-40 minutes of content and pumped all their metrics. They know that the average viewer of content on Prime Video doesn’t know what a ‘Sifu’ is, or an ‘Unreal Tournament’, or an ‘Armored Core’… They know that the majority of the viewers for Secret Level are not going to know that ‘Concord’ is dead, nor will they care if they ever find out, so it won’t matter at all for their single episode in an anthology. Hell, for that matter as much as it sucks, Unreal Tournament has been dead for years and you can’t even buy most of the legacy versions of that game anymore thanks to Epic, so I really doubt that Amazon Prime Video cares much at all about the games represented in their anthology being alive. They just need things to fit the framing of the show so that viewers at home will go, “Oh, it’s that thing from the makers of ‘Love Death + Robots’ about video games, think I’ll have a look.” So long as everything under the label looks sufficiently video gamey, the average viewer will enjoy the show and move on whether or not they could ever actually play those games.