They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.

All the more reason for Amazon to not give a fuck and release the episode anyway. They already expended the effort and money, they've probably already sold the ads to run against it, they've got streaming hour benchmarks to hit if they want to claim the show is a success, so everything is running in favor of Amazon taking a look at the shitshow the game is in and saying, "SHIP IT" for their Secret Level episode. Normies who aren't super into gaming aren't going to know that the game it represents is dead, and there's a fair chance that Sony will pursue F2P explicitly so that it can not be when the episode airs so they can attempt to get some money from those people who will see the episode and want to play the game. The people behind "Love Death + Robots" are behind this series, they're probably going to ship a good Concord episode that will make that bland mess of Live Service nonsense seem interesting whether or not the game is good or even alive.

There are no announced plans to take it F2P

The fact that the announcement says they're taking the servers offline and looking at options to connect with "their players", while Sony have also not just shut down Firewalk Studios (A wholly owned subsidiary of Sony) is more or less a full endorsement of the idea that they think they can make a go of this by going F2P. Studios that flat out fail don't stick around in this day and age and the director of the game is saying that they're looking at options to connect with "their players", how is that not saying that they're going to remove the one barrier to entry that everyone is talking about by taking the game free to play?

Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.

I think you may have misunderstood, I didn't mean to suggest that Concord was a headline IP, I was saying that Amazon considers Secret Level to be a headline IP for Prime Video and they've got zero fucks to give about what good (or bad) business the game their episode is based on is doing, they need butts in seats to watch their prestige video games anthology series from the makers of "Love Death + Robots" and I don't think they give a single shit if Sony feels bad because their game didn't make it and Amazon still launched an episode set in the same universe as the game.

It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.

Not if ad sales has already written contracts for ads against a set number of episodes. Not if you have streamed hour targets that you need to hit for the show if you want to keep making future seasons of the thing. Not if you are not a gamer and don't give any fucks about the stupid decisions that Sony made with the IP they probably paid you to make an episode about. There's absolutely zero reason for Amazon to shitcan an episode of this show just because the game it's based on was nonsense and everyone knew it years before the game ever launched, it's an extra 30-40 minutes of space to stick ads and pump "hours watched" even if the episode is as bland as the game. Ads and hours are the only things that video platforms care about, they're going to keep that episode unless there's a contractual obligation to cancel it. I doubt that Sony had the foresight to put something in their contract that allowed them to shut things down if the game flopped, and even if they did, such a provision would usually mean that they'd have to pay Amazon some penalty to exercise that option which probably makes it cheaper for Sony to just allow it to move ahead.

I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.

I would not take that bet. I also think the brand is dead. It's got a year or two tops of being a shambling zombie, but you're thinking too much like a rational person and businesses don't think like that, they're going to try to squeeze blood from this stone, it's the only thing they know how to do.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The Secret Level episode is confirmed to be on, so I guess we'll get at least a peek at what they felt was there for us to enjoy in Concord.

C-Suit idiots might legitimately fear that the mere existence of its episode could overshadow the entire rest of the show.

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.