Immortals Of Aveum cost $125 million and "no one bought it"

Magical first-person shooter Immortals Of Aveum launched last August and by the following month half its development team had been laid off due to poor sales.

In a new report by IGN on widespread industry layoffs, developers who worked on Aveum say it cost around $125 million to make and "no one bought it."

"At a high level, Immortals was massively overscoped for a studio’s debut project. The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution," one former developer told IGN. All the developers who discussed the project were anonymous. "Sure, there was some serious talent on the development team, but trying to make a AAA single-player shooter in today’s market was a truly awful idea, especially since it was a new IP that was also trying to leverage Unreal Engine 5. What ended up launching was a bloated, repetitive campaign that was far too long."

A different developer on the game, one still employed by Ascendant, argued the opposite, saying that Aveum was what many gamers claim to want. "It's not a sequel or a remake, it doesn't take 400 hours to beat, has zero microtransactions, no pointless open world grinding. Although not everyone loved it, it reviewed pretty well, currently sitting at a 74 on Open Critic and a Mostly Positive on Steam. No one bought it."

Sales were apparently only a tiny fraction of those its publisher projected.

"There's plenty of layoffs due to gross mismanagement and greed (looking at you Embracer), but there's also plenty that happen because this is a stupidly volatile market that requires mountains of capital to participate in at a professional studio level," one developer said. "For all the things Ascendant did right (paying people well, an entirely remote studio, little overtime until the end, chill environment with lots of freedom to grow, respecting QA, hiring juniors, etc.), it did not work out."

It would be easy to read these comments and take from it the lesson that people don't really care about singleplayer games, or about games that are short or don't have microtransations. I don't think that's a fair conclusion though, or really what the developers here are suggesting.

Alice B found things to enjoy in her Immortals Of Aveum review, while also finding it repetitive, shallow, and lacking punch. That's a tough sell in a busy year in which lots of great games clamoured for attention. Bad or middling games can sometimes find an audience, anyway - but I also suspect Immortals Of Aveum's larger problem is that it's not clear what its core fantasy is or who it appeals to. It all just seemed a bit naff.

IGN's full report is worth reading, and includes comments from other developers affected by layoffs, including those at Relic, who were likewise impacted by the underperformance of Company Of Heroes 3.