Immortals of Aveum
While this is a year of some of the best video game releases in a decade, there are a few bombs. And one of the appears to be Immortals of Aveum, a game that has so far peaked at 751 Steam players after launch, and is declining from there.
If you’ve been on Twitter or Twitch the past week, you’ve likely seen a whole bunch of streamers playing Immortals of Aveum. But playing as part of sponsored #ad campaigns. You can just search “Immortals of Aveum #ad” on Twitter, and see dozens and dozens of streamers who have been a part of the campaign, even some huge ones, but at least on PC, it has amounted to really nothing at all. It’s a massive miss from publisher EA and developer Ascendant Studios, which was mostly formed out of ex-Telltale employees after that studio went bankrupt. Immortals had a flashy debut at The Game Awards last year, but again, this is not going well.
Immortals of Aveum is a full $60 release on PC ($70 on console), a big barrier when sandwiched between the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3, Armored Core 6 and the upcoming Starfield. Reviews are..not great. A 66 Metascore on PC, 70 on PS5. It does get u p to an 82 on Xbox Series X. But user scores are low, and on Steam itself, it has mixed reviews. I’ve seen worse (Redfall!), but the numbers sort of speak for themselves.
To me, this shows the limits of a streamer-based ad campaign. This has been an absolute flood of sponsored streams, which no doubt cost EA a pretty penny. You can just keep scrolling and scrolling on Twitter and see an endless list of these sponsorships, but now that most have ended, on Twitch, Immortals of Aveum currently has 374 viewers. Effectively none of those streamers graduated from paid sponsorships to actually playing the game of their own volition.
I do wonder what happens to Ascendant Studios from here, as this is not a good debut, and I’d doubt if EA sponsorship would continue after this. It’s a bummer, but this was a very, very tough year to launch any original, lower key game in, given that we are in a season of non-stop hits. And your game has to be better than average to stand out in a market this intense, especially if you’re charging full AAA price.
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