EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea"
EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea"
"No one bought it"
A first-person, single-player AAA shooter could be exactly my cuppa. However, there'd be zero chance I'm buying a game from EA so there's that.
47Honestly fuck EA.
11Depends on if the game has almost no bugs, and EA lets the studio have full creative direction. Also if it is good. Like "It Takes Two," and "A Way Out."
Last first person I played through was "Trepang²." Currently playing through a third person called "Quantum Break."
2If it has EA as only the publisher, I might buy it later on sale. But if it's first-party within EA, nah. Take-Two is actually the same for me these days. I won't touch Blizzard-Activision anymore either (which is sad because I bought Warcraft and Starcraft when they came out originally and would play over modem with my buddies).
2
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.
See, it's the last part of that quote that's the problem. Not the concept of a AAA sp fps.
38I'm going to chime in on the "never even heard of this game" train.
And based on that, I'll "tinfoil hat" a bit: the game doesn't seem to have any kind of mtx (it does have a deluxe edition items which apparently offer boosts) - so the publisher didn't push the game as hard as it does with it's live service games -> very few even have heard of this game.
edit: because sources: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Immortals_of_Aveum#Monetization - didn't do any further research on the matter.
edit2: also, on the article:
... 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."
...so, they even admit it themselves that it's pretty meh? And then it's framed like single-player games just don't sell.. what?
34Yeah, the headline is stupid. If they made a good AAA game that was only as long as it needed to be, it'd sell. The issue is all the AAA publishers think games need to take as much time to play as possible, which sucks so much.
AAA gaming is mostly dead to me for many years now because they don't know how to make good games. They just know how to convince people to buy the crap they make. Theres a few that I'll still play, like anything FromSoft makes (that's available on PC), but not much.
12The issue is all the AAA publishers think games need to take as much time to play as possible, which sucks so much.
the thing is, they're somewhat right too. So many times at the steam forums, people ask "how long" a releasing game is going to be, and overall prefer length. To a degree I do understand that people want content for the 60-80 €/$/£. Personally I'd like quality over quantity, but it gets a bit wishywashy depending on genre and what is expected of it.
If we're using the "A"'s as a metric of sorts, I kinda feel like "AA" -range is pretty much where it is at. Generally not overly flashy, designed by a committee or exhaustively long.
8
Yep, never heard of it until just now. A quick trip to youtube for gameplay vids makes the first 15 minutes look pretty good though. The gameplay would totally get repetitive fast, and the vid I watched didn't get into the skill trees. If the level up mechanics give you more spells to choose from, rather than just increasing the numbers for the 3 spells you start with, I think the game has potential. Right now, it seems like something I would like to try first and maybe buy a physical copy that can't be disabled when some corporate licensing deal falls apart (and make backups of the installer).
4Kinda sounds like fairly decent mid-price AA-release the way you put it.
HowLongToBeat puts it around 15h (https://howlongtobeat.com/game/118227) - for a modern title that isn't even overly long, so got to wonder how does it manage to be "bloated, repetitive campaign that was far too long" as the dev (?) in the article was quoted saying...
2
"we made a mid game and released it at a bad time, we couldn't possibly be the reason it failed, clearly the world just doesn't want single player shooters!"
30Or the game wasn't that good, so people didn't buy it?
30It has better reviews than Jedi Survivor on Steam. I think the problem is that they didn't market it whatsoever. Gamers have to know about games in order to buy them.
7
I’d not even heard of the game until now. Maybe they chose a bad launch window.
It’s also EA so I doubt people that did hear of it were particularly excited, especially given the milquetoast title of the game.
26Single-player shooters are my thing (ain't got time for multiplayer and the dedication needed for it), and EA games aren't my thing.
15I guess Doom 2016 and Doom eternal bombed and no one told me.
I'm not saying making and marketing a single player AAA shooter is an easy thing, but id software and Bethesda proved that it's possible
12It was just really bland.
A magic FPS sounds great. I want more of them. I didn't completely hate the demo. But there were three spells for the part I played and none of them felt good. And all the reviews implied there really wasn't much more.
Spending all that money on a mediocre game is the bad idea. And spending 40 million on marketing and having no one know what your game is is just kind of funny.
12Imagine if the Heretic series dropped in 2024 instead of the 90s? I feel like people would go crazy for that game with a modern engine and level design.
7I loved me some heretic. The mages lightning spell was so satisfying.
2
First time I'm hearing of this game. I think big publishers are going to realize soon that while the gaming market is big, the attention span of gamers is narrow. They just don't have it in them to buy 4 or 5 big games a year when every game seems to be a live service, battlepass infused time sink.
10So many gamers won't touch EA on general principles. Every new game they make there's more
10It takes two did well
4EA 8 years ago: Ya.
These days they are managing to publish some good stuff. But two things: 1. I'm waiting on player reviews. 2. If I never hear about the game - you failed to make sure the market was aware.
2
This seems exactly like the type of game I’d buy and play… if I had heard about it.
8Yea, I found about this yesterday and went "wow, that kinda sounds awsome"
Never heard about it before though
2
I was looking forward to this game. The market didn't fail them, they failed the market.
4Just in general, how DO single purchase games make money unless they are huge hits? Lets say they make about 50$ per copy sold (Steam, Xbox and PS take their 30% of course). If the game cost 125 M to make this would mean they need to sell 2,5 Million copies at full price to break even.
22.5 million people just isn't a big hit when you're spending 40 million on ads.
It's huge for an indie, but that's because they're not spending big bucks on development and advertising, and are mostly inherently targeting smaller audiences.
1