Immortals of Aveum studio layoffs were down to poor sales in a crowded market, CEO says
The CEO of Immortals of Aveum developer Ascendant Studios says that poor game sales due to a crowded release window were what led to nearly half the team being laid off.
In an interview with the Xbox Expansion Pass YouTube channel, Bret Robbins was asked about the decision in Septemberto lay off around 45% of the game’s staff.
Robbins replied by pointing out that Ascendant was one of numerous studios that laid off staff this year, and said the main reason for it was that the game simply didn’t sell enough copies.
“It’s a crazy time right now,” Robbins explained. “There’s an article every day about some kind of huge layoff, and it’s unfortunate. It’s certainly the hardest thing I’ve had to do.
“You work really hard with people, they’ve put their faith in you and their trust in you, and you want to honour that as much as you can, so when you have to make a decision like that it really sucks.
“We are an independent company. We’re not EA, we’re not a large organisation. Our bottom line required us to sell a lot of video games, and we didn’t meet our targets, and that’s just the unfortunate dollars and cents of it, and that meanst we had to do some layoffs.
“There are so many things when you’re making a game that are out of your control – certainly the market can be largely out of your control – and it was unfortunate for us, but my hope is that I can work with a lot of those people again and that with our next project, or future projects, we continue to grow.”
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Robbins was asked if releasing the game in one of the busiest years for video game releases was one of the contributing factors to its poor sales.
He replied that he felt this to be
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