It's Not Just Hollywood: $125 Million Video Game Deemed a Flop After Abysmal Fan Response
As any creative person with a pulse on pop culture would tell you… this is bad news.
Both consumers and creatives are staring down a future where all media projects will fall neatly into one of two categories:
- A low-cost indie project.
- An insanely expensive mega-media project.
And that dichotomy will apply to just about every medium under the sun: music, video games, podcasts, movies and television shows.
That means that entertainment will almost exclusively be tiny, three-people-max projects or massive multi-million dollar, multi-conglomerate projects — with that precious middle space between those two extremes quickly being squeezed out.
And why is that bad?
Well, one glance at the waves of layoffs hitting various sectors of the entertainment industry should be all the proof you need, but just in case you need more proof, take this scathing report from IGN.
The IGN report explored some of the root causes of the layoffs hitting the video game industry and offered one particularly damning anecdote as part of that larger exploration.
“Immortals of Aveum” developer “Ascendant Studios” suffered through a wave of layoffs, per IGN, and many ex-studio employees put much of the blame for those layoffs at the feet of “Aveum.”
As a quick bit of background: “Immortals of Aveum” was a single-player, first-person game that swapped out military guns for magic, and came out in August 2023. It was critically “meh” but a massive commercial flop, otherwise.
“At a high level, Immortals was massively overscoped for a studio’s debut project,” one former Ascendant employee told IGN, before noting the massive $120 million-plus investment that Electronic Arts made in the project.
The ex-employee said: “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, this one still employed by Ascendant Studios, pointed out the one fatal flaw of the game: “No one bought it.”
“It’s not a sequel or a remake, it doesn’t take 400 hours to beat, has zero microtransactions, no pointless open world grinding,” the employee said. “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.”
Another unidentified employee told IGN that maybe, just maybe, this sort of volatility is unavoidable: “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.
“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.”
Some of the online discourse swung to the fact that “Aveum” didn’t feature a robust multiplayer component, which is what typically gets most gamers to stay after the credits roll.
Others disagreed.
About 50% of the top 20 best selling games in NPD last year were single player.
— Shinobi602 (@shinobi602) February 13, 2024
“Immortals Of Aveum Proves It’s A Grim Time For Single-Player Games,” Kotaku claimed.
“About 50% of the top 20 best selling games in NPD last year were single player,” one popular video game insider on X posted. “No.”
But while single-player games may not be on their deathbed, medium-sized projects certainly appear to be.
As mentioned earlier, it seems that any piece of medium that sees the light of day today will either be:
- A very small project, with little more than a prayer for it to exceed its humble origins.
- A massive (and likely creatively bankrupt) project that costs so much to make, it can only be a success if it brings in a billion dollars.
The medium ground between those two extremes is quickly being squeezed out and that’s not good for anyone — from consumers who want quality products to workers who want work.
“Immortals of Aveum” may have been just one game that turned into a financial pitfall, but it certainly won’t be the last looking at the way the video game industry is going.
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