Ascendant Studios, the company responsible for the highly anticipated fantasy FPS Immortals of Aveum, has laid off nearly half of its staff following the release of its debut title. As you can imagine, sales have not been favorable.
For that reason, the indie studio stated that the layoffs were ‘difficult but necessary’ in the current times. It is estimated that Ascendant Studios employed between 80 and 100 people, meaning they have let go of around 40 employees.
CEO’s Twitter message announcing the layoffs
Today, our hearts are broken as we say goodbye to friends and colleagues at Ascendant Studios, around 45% of our team,” CEO Bret Robbins explained on Twitter/X yesterday.
“This was a painfully difficult but necessary decision that was not taken lightly; however, we have to make this adjustment now that Immortals of Aveum has been released,” he concluded.
Robbins added that the studio will continue to support the development of the game and the Immortals IP in the future, so future patches and new content are expected, but now with a much smaller team.
Dismissals due to extremely low sales
An former employee told Polygon that the layoffs were due to the poor sales of Immortals of Aveum, which was released on August 22. The game was heavily promoted as one of the first major titles for Unreal Engine 5.1, with improvements in lighting, video effects, and physics thanks to Nanite and Lumen.
In the technical section of Immortals of Aveum, the Nanite micropolygon geometry system is mentioned, which intelligently adjusts the level of detail of any object in the game based on how close you are to it.
There’s also a section on Lumen, which provides real-time mobile and changing lighting.
But advanced graphical technology doesn’t count for much when people simply don’t enjoy the game; performance issues on PC didn’t help either.
Immortals of Aveum received mixed reviews. While its 73% rating on Steam qualifies it as “mostly positive,” the peak concurrent players in 24 hours are only 67, with a historical peak of just 751, according to SteamDB. This is in stark contrast to the million players Starfield reached a few days ago.
A former employee told Polygon that Immortals of Aveum is probably one of the worst-selling EA Original titles for Electronic Arts as its publisher. That’s saying something.
