"The Immortals of Aveum story isn't written yet"

gamesindustry.biz:

In Europe, Immortals of Aveum was the 469th best-selling game of 2023.

Now, No.469 isn't necessarily a bad spot. If you're a small developer making a game on a tight budget, 469th position could be perfectly profitable.

Immortals of Aveum was not made by a small developer. It was not made on a tight budget. It is a AAA fantasy shooter created by a 100-person dev team, led by a former Call of Duty creative director and published by EA. No.469 was not perfectly profitable. And a month after the game was released, developer Ascendant Studio laid off 40 employees.

Not every game can be a hit. When you take a gamble on something new, it might not pay off. Immortals of Aveum isn't the first AAA game to miss, and it won't be the last. Yet what's different this time is that studio founder Bret Robbins wants to talk about it.

"It was a murderer's row of big games"

"You learn more from failures and mistakes than successes," he begins. "People should hear all sorts of stories, not just about the huge breakaway hits, but also when things don't go so well. And that doesn't mean they're not good, and it doesn't mean that story shouldn't be told."

So what went wrong?

"When we were heading to launch, we knew it was very crowded," he says. "This was a very unusual year. Zelda had come out, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was a little before us. And as we were nearing launch, Baldur's Gate 3 suddenly blew up right in front of us. That one, more than any of the others, seemed unanticipated.

"We knew we had Armored Core 6 the same week, and we were worried about that. And Starfield was like ten days after us. We were sandwiched between a lot of different big games, or games from really big studios. We absolutely got lost in the noise. And that was unfortunate, because we pushed the date out a bit in order to get a good polish pass done, to get performance better [it was originally due July 20, but launched August 22]. Although the game was better, the timing was worse."

Baldur's Gate 3 was initially