EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea"
EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea"
you have to market games if you want them to succeed ffs
"It's not a sequel or a remake, it doesn't take 400 hours to beat, has zero microtransactions, no pointless open world grinding..."
All of that sounds pretty great, though. I hadn't heard of this game until now, so I'm wondering how efficient they were with that 40 mil in marketing
Or maybe the idea is good, but the execution is bad. Maybe meeting strict deadlines meant the game had to be pushed out unfinished, or concepts had to be cut or changed. I don't know jack shit about this game, but there are a lot of things worth looking into besides "These games just don't sell these days"
Editing to add that it's currently 60% off on steam, sitting at a "mostly positive"
I watched a couple gameplay videos a while back, and even after seeing these headlines, and it looks kinda fun. It looks like it has a decent magic system with a bit of variety.
Honestly sometimes a good magic casting system is all I really need to have fun with a game.
Immortals of Aveum launched in August 2023 amidst one of the busiest years of game releases in history, bookended by behemoths like Diablo 4, Starfield, and Baldur's Gate 3. Ascendant Studios' self-styled "Call of Duty with magic" experiment was compelling enough, and I personally think it deserved more attention, but it ultimately missed EA's expectations by enough of a margin that about 45% of the studio's workforce was laid off shortly after release.
Oof! That must be hard to stomach. Knowing it's actually a quality product, but because the stars didn't line up, you are let go...
All the gameplay I saw on release did not look quality. It simply did not seem fun to play, you can hit all the feature check boxes, but if your game is just a bunch of blinding particle effects it's going to get panned.
The market at large may not have seen it as a quality product, going by reviews.
Why is it an awful idea? Sounds like my kind of game?
It's an awful idea because their attempt at it didn't work.
So it was an awful attempt then
The headline is pretty misleading. The full quote states this being the studios debut game made several factors major problems. UE5 as the engine, a highly competitive genre, and a new IP made nearly insurmountable obstacles. For comparison, Doom Eternal, their obvious AAA competitor, was from a veteran studio with a legendary IP built on literal decades of custom engine experience. On the other hand, a game like Ultrakill can compete by having an incredibly tight scope.
UE5 was a big part honestly, pretty much lost all interest in getting the game this year when I learned how bad the performance was on PC.
I don't know enough about it to say that UE5 guarantees bad performance, but it seems like every UE5 release this past year runs terribly.
The original UE5 seemed slightly premature, the 5.1 and 5.2 updates were significant and non trivial to update to. It also seems like a tool that gives you enough rope to hang yourself. Unlike Unity, everyone gets ready access to the full engine source code. Fortnite runs UE5, so the performance isn't inherently bad.
I think I saw an ad for this when it came out, but I thought it was some multiplayer hero shooter thing, which doesn’t interest me.
Maybe not release it in-between BG3 and Starfield would have been better, hey?
