Immortals of Aveum
The EA flop Immortals Of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million. And former dev says “A AAA single-player shooter in today’s market was a truly awful idea”. A recent report provides insight into the amount of money EA spent on their single-player first-person shooter Immortals of Aveum, which was a commercial failure and garnered mediocre reviews.
With the release of Diablo 4, Starfield, and Baldur’s Gate 3 at both ends of one of the busiest game release years ever, Immortals of Aveum debuted in August 2023. Although I felt Ascendant Studios’ “Call of Duty with magic” experiment was interesting enough and should have received more attention. In the end, it fell short of EA’s expectations to the point where nearly 45% of the studio’s staff was let go soon after the game’s release.
Bret Robbins, the CEO of the company, has publicly attributed Immortals’ weak sales to the previous year’s incredibly hectic release schedule. However, a former Ascendant employee who wished to remain anonymous told IGN that the game’s large budget and basic design flaws were what ultimately brought the project to an end.
AAA Single Player Shooter:
The ex-worker claimed that Immortals was “muchly overscoped for a studio’s debut project.” “It took about 445 million to produce, and I believe EA contributed $40 million for marketing and distribution. Although the development team had some very talented people. It was a really bad decision to try to create a AAA single-player shooter in the current market. Especially given it was a new IP and also attempted to use Unreal Engine 5. In the end, an overly drawn-out, repetitious campaign was launched.”
Whatever the reason for Immortals of Aveum‘s failure. It’s a bad thing that it will deter big studios from making the kind of high-budget, single-player, no-nonsense action games that we’re seeing fewer and fewer of these days. It’s also a bad thing that redundancies affecting enthusiastic developers make things worse.
Although there was potential in Immortals’ traditional approach. Another unidentified Ascendant staffer acknowledged to IGN that the game did not find an audience. It’s not a remake or a sequel, and it doesn’t require 400 hours to complete. It also doesn’t include any microtransactions or needless open-world grinding. It received generally positive reviews, with a 74 on OpenCritic and a Mostly Positive on Steam. Even though not everyone was a fan. Nobody purchased it.
