Immortals of Aveum's Developer Lets Go Almost Half of Its Staff

Immortals of Aveum is a magic shooter from the developers of Call of Duty and Dead Space, which is one of the first AAA games created with the help of Nanite and Lumen. The game takes players on a single-player adventure, in a magical and conflict-ridden fantasy realm on the precipice of destruction. It immerses players into the heroic journey of Jak, a wielder of potent magic and aspiring Immortal, as he strives to rescue a world ravaged by the catastrophic Everwar.

Since the game was created by the already-renowned team of developers, players were looking forward to it, hoping that the game would exceed their expectations. However, after its release on August 22, 2023, everything didn't go as smoothly as the creators wished.

While official sales figures are not available yet, SteamDB data shows that Immortals of Aveum achieved its highest player count on Steam, with 751 players, shortly after its release. However, within the first month since its launch, the game has experienced a decline, reaching a peak of 74 players within the last 24 hours, as per the database's statistics. At the time of writing, there are only 39 players playing the game.

It seems that after the failed release of the game, the company came to the decision to lay off around 40 people who worked on the Immortals of Aveum production, that's what the three former staff members said to Polygon. 

According to a former employee of Ascendant Studios, the reason for the layoffs was attributed to the low sales of the game. The ex-employee mentioned that the studio relied on the game's revenue to support their operations. The other employee revealed that Immortals of Aveum had one of the lowest sales figures among the games published by Electronic Arts. They added that the initial layoffs at Ascendant Studios took place shortly after the shooter's release.

Here's what Bret Robbins, the CEO of Ascendant Studios, wrote on Twitter about the situation:

The same layoff situation happened with another video game development studio – Visual Concepts, which unexpectedly fired several employees from the company. You can read the full article here.

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