Former Immortals of Aveum Dev: $125 Million Budget Was a 'Truly Awful Idea' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 March 2024 / 4,881 Views
Ascendant Studios released Immortals of Aveum in Summer 2023 and the game ended up selling poorly leading to the studio laying off around 45 percent of its employees.
A former employee at the studio said spending around $125 million on Immortals of Aveum was a "truly awful idea."
"At a high level, Immortals was massively overscoped for a studio’s debut project," the former employee told IGN. "The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution.
"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."
Another employee, who is still at the studio, stated, "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."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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$125 million? Where the hell did they spend all of that money?
Witcher 3 was like $70 million to make including marketing.
Japanese studios have budgeting in check. That's why Persona 3 Reload, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth can reach the 1 million sales milestone and have it be great news, whereas Western game studio budgets are so absurd that 1 million sales looks like an absolute flop.
That's a great question, considering €70 million or so gets you Alan Wake II.
The game doesn't even feel like $50 million game, let alone $125 million wtf
That's just the gap between how people use AAA and what it actually means.
To be honest, the gameplay and looks, dont scream "we spent 125m" on this. Instead of a first person shooter, maybe they should have made a RPG ? :)
Yeah, that is too big of a budget for a new studio for sure, you should always go AA until you grow a reputation and fanbase, then make the move to AAA, unless your new studio has some major AAA talent, people who worked on GOTY tier games who have a reputation of their own to make for the new studio's lack of reputation.
A suspected $40 million in advertising, and yet it feels like most people didn't realize it even released until all these articles about it failing started coming out.
You can't just make a "Good" or "Okay" game on a 125 million dollar budget.
You need it to be a standout.
You make a standout game... You don't need to dump 40+ million on advertising, word of mouth will do the hard work.
I.E. Fortnite, Palworld, Baldurs Gate 3, Minecraft etc'.
As one of the nobodies who actually bought it, I would agree that it was something in between "o.k." and "good" (I did finsih the campaign). I would not say you missed anything if you didn't play it, but one thing I think it is a bit of a pity is that they really tried something here with a fresh team, UE5, first-person-magic-shooter, new IP, new universe including lore, straight up single player story game, substantial marketing budget behind it and so on. But it did not work out. So unfortunately that makes it less likely that a similar risk is being taken in the future and makes it more likely that we get the next remake/ sequel/ GaaS title that plays it by the numbers. I appreciate they tried.
The game was mid lets just leave it at that
That’s bit of a big budget
