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It looks like the launch of a major PC and console game has generated such poor sales that its developer is reportedly axing nearly half of its employees just a few weeks after the game’s launch. The game in question is Immortals of Aveum, the fantasy-themed first-person shooter from developer Ascendant Studios.
Polygon is reporting, via unnamed sources, that Ascendant laid off about 40 of its approximately 80-100 team members today. The reason cited was poor sales for Immortals of Aveum, which launched on August 22 for the PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5 platforms.
The game received mixed reviews from critics; Metacritic shows an average review score of 70 (out of 100) for the title. The single-player only game certainly has not received many players in its PC version on Steam. The SteamDB site currently shows that about 71 gamers are playing the game online at the moment.
In hindsight, the game, which was published by Electronic Arts, also suffered a bit with its release date, as it launched just a few weeks after the hit RPG Baldur’s Gate 3, and a few weeks until the launch of the highly anticipated Starfield.
To top all of that off, Immortals of Aveum was one of the first third-party games to use Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5. The developer posted its final PC hardware requirements for the game a few days before launch and they were definitely on the higher side.
Since its launch, Ascendant has released three patches for the game. The second patch included quite a few that were specific for the PC version, including adding three graphics settings (Mesh Pool Quality, Shadow Rendering Pool Size, Render Target Pool Size). The third update addressed some issues with the game’s use of NVIDIA’s DLSS features.
With today’s news of the layoffs, it’s unknown if the game will continue to get updated.
Update: 5:55 pm Eastern time – Ascendant Studios head Bret Robbins has confirmed the news about the layoffs in an X (formerly Twitter) post. He added that the remaining team members will continue to support Immortals of Aveum via “future updates and offers”.
