Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅
And I mean, that’s maybe where the problems lie. This game is all jank and all generics, with no specific thing to present except “OMG LOOK AT OUR GRAPHICS!!!”. Which are also pretty unoptimized, so you end up with:
- Only a tiny tiny fraction of players can even play it.
- Then, the game is utterly generic. Despite how it might look to someone not knowing about it, DOOM 2016 and Eternal are quite unique games and have a very well-designed gameplay flow that even differs divisively between the two.
- The writing is horrible and would make even an MCU movie/series writer question their decisions in life.
- The magic is still just guns with replaced graphics. They didn’t lean into the very premise of the game at all. And all they had to do is play Lichdom Battlemage from 2014 to get some ideas and that game already struggled with the concept. But at least it pulled it off.
Can’t really say I’m surprised the game flopped hard. But unlike the dev I would call the underlying idea solid, just not anything about the execution.
Big “no one understands my art” vibes coming off that dev. You made a mediocre game for an outrageous amount and released it in one of the heaviest gaming release years in recent memory. Sorry, this year a new IP with a 74% on metacritic doesn’t cut it. They say EA dropped 40mil on the advertising for it, but this is litterally the first I’ve heard about it, and frankly I’m the target audience for this game. I bet this shit was shoved down the throats of Fortnight and Valorant players via tiktok.
Same. Those 40mil probably went into someones pocket, not surprising noone is playing the game
No one is playing it because it’s very “meh”, but it has absolutely been widely advertised and also talked about a lot (for being not so good).
I really doubt any of you who replied here saying you haven’t heard about it ever interact with gaming journalism and community. It has been just as visible as most other AAA games.
I’m not really the target audience and I’ve come across it what must be hundreds of times. It has been talked about a lot on anything gaming. Most of the big gaming journalism (good and bad) websites, youtube channels etc have made articles and videos about it.
I think EA makes games like this to reinforce THEIR notion that single player games are dead so they can use that as leverage to make more “games as a service”. If they made things people actually wanted to play, they’d find that single player (yes even shooter) games are still just as popular as they ever were and poorly thought out, poorly executed, and poorly marketed games still suck.
Case in point. Baldurs gate 3.
Single player (with optional co op multiplayer) but massively successful.
Not to beat a dead horse. Its just the first example that came to mind.
A huge amount of very successful indie games are single-player and even other AAA games.
They talk about the genre being dead but they forget that most games dont charge you to play them anymore. They make money through in game purchases selling cosmetics and battle pasees.
These game genres could be described as dead by the same criteria if they cost actual money.
Its just the first example that came to mind.
Uh, in this case it’s a single-player, shooter, from a brand new IP. I’m probably just commenting just to argue but I don’t think Baldur’s Gate 3 is a good comparison at all.
I think you might be, haha.
But in the i terest of a fairer comparison, i had a quick google and found this game “atomic heart,” a generally well received game with high ratings and the following from Steam Revenue calculator
“We estimate that Atomic Heart made $55,756,625.68in gross revenue since its release. Out of this, the developer had an estimated net revenue of $16,448,204.58.”
New ip, single-player, shooter.
Comparatively, immortals lost money and tbey apparently laid of 45% of the staff who made it to avoid losses.
The thing that we all keep missing about this is even though EA sucks because it is an example of late stage capitalism hollowing out everything for profit, doesn’t actually mean the idiots with MBAs from Harvard or whatever running the company are actually making intelligent choices about profit.
The system of capitalism actually perpetuates itself better when things periodically catastrophically fail from wildly incompetent leadership since it keeps worker power from organizing, wipes out competitors that aren’t also massive corporations that can be easily colluded with, and provides a perfect backdrop for the rich to say “sorrrrrry it all broke again, guess we are the only ones that can fix it, so we will maybe take this chance to buy up more of the economy :) “.
So yes in a very real way I think EA functions to devalue the labor of game developers, keep competition of smaller game development studios categorically unable to create products like EA, and serve as a vessel to ritualistically dissect smaller game companies so that companies like EA have an infinite, desperate workforce and consumers have no better choice for video games. Just because these processes are twisted and rationalized under a story about the ruthless, noble pursuit of profit doesn’t make them have any real connection with efficiency or profit. One could perhaps say this all has much more to do with violence than it does profit.
That is the thing about ideologies, whether they have any connection to reality or not is actually not very important at all to the truly successful ones that permeate the way societies think about themselves.
Additionally, anything that can help massive corporations that are strip mining the gaming industry claim the gaming industry is sliding into a tough period where it’s hard to make games that turn enough of a profit to steadily employ game developers, is EXTREMELY useful to companies like EA because they see this whole AI thing as an opportunity to deal a permanent blow to the quality of life and general leverage workers have in the game development industry. Thank god the movie industry saw it coming a mile off, but video game culture is too full of toxic conservative little boys screaming at each other to understand what is about to happen (and is already happening).
It breaks my heart, but what is happening right now will likely deal a blow to the vibrancy of video games as an art form that will reverberate for decades. After all, once a worker exits the game development industry because they can’t find a job it doesn’t matter how passionate they were about video games, how special their talent is, how creative or unique their ideas are… they sure as hell aren’t coming back once they get that a job in an industry that doesn’t hate its workers so much and besides a deep sense of burnout about something you love is truly one of the most awful experiences in the world… not many people are willing to revisit a place they experienced that.
That’s why AAA+ is failing and indie games are getting better than ever. It’s insane how good the tools and engines have gotten. Making games had become much more accessible than ever.
Making games had become much more accessible than ever.
Making music has become MASSIVELY more accessible than ever, but you know what? It’s just a hobby now, capitalism has destroyed making and recording music as a livelihood unless you manage to get a handful unicorn jobs.
Just because it is easy for a company to enter a market doesn’t mean that structural, toxic issues with that market magically are nullified as problems. Gamers as a category seem to have a REALLY hard time wrapping their head around this.
No, AAA+ blockbuster games are dead. The 150 million budget is insane. Spending that much on a game, you end up having to minimize the risks and having to cater to the widest audience possible.
If you split that budget into maybe 2 larger and a few smaller games, you don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. You can take more risk, experiment with new mechanics and ideas. You can target different types of players. You can give a chance to smaller, lesser known writers who might have potential.
The what of what now?
Literally the first I’ve heard about it as well. Maybe should have tossed a bit of that money at the marketing department.
They did, 40million of the budget went to marketing
Oh. Oh dear.
What did they do with the two bags of chips after someone pocketed 39,999,990 dollars?
Disagree. The fact that I’m only hearing about it now that it’s flopped is a good thing because I might have given it attention before. Well, probably not because it’s EA.
I just hope that companies that aren’t EA don’t take what they say about single player games at face value. EA games probably need friend group hype to succeed at this point. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking that there are many others like me who want to avoid anything from that company and thus would only play when pressured by friends.
But if EA does fail, there likely will be a period where they try to talk about it like experts and will just say, “oh, gamers must not like x genre anymore”, when gamers really just don’t like overproduced garbage games that are clearly tuned to sell MTX rather than be fun.
I play a lot of games but Ive never heard of this game before this post
Peak player count was less than 800 players on steam… Flop is an understatement.
Those 100 workers EA laid off dont deserve to be thrown in the trash; why dont the execs take a nice paycut instead?
Single player shooter’s aren’t bad or even unpopular right now. But I think people are beginning to realize that anything that has EA’s name attached to it is trash and just avoid it on principal.
Jup, even new iterations of their older IP seem to be devolving instead of taking that which was fun and expanding on it.
Maybe they should use all these behaviour experts to investigate why people keep playing games instead of figuring out how to maximally predate on your customer base.
Ubi does the same. I found the last farcy so Uninteresting that I stopped playing somewhere mid game. And the first signals from their pirate game are also not encouraging, while I know many people that looked forward to it.
Of course, Doom doesn’t exist right
Yeah, but you see… Doom was a rare unicorn. It came with refreshing ideas, looked visually attractive, played good, and was fun.
That’s a tall ask from EA.
It was also an established IP with name recognition.
Is this a single player shooter? I thought it was multi player? And theres nothing wrong with single player shooters “in todays market” look at jedi fallen order great game and singlr player. But a shit game is a shit game single or multi.
I’ll go counter-current here and say that it was a fun game. IGN review sells it really well, and I had fun while playing it. I’d say the main problem of the game was releasing in a year already full of big-name releases, and a marketing campaign that was too quiet - I’m honestly surprised it cost $40 million, because I only heard of the game by pure chance.
Yeah I will say, it’s painfully generic and I hate the MCU-style humor, but it’s not a bad game per se. It’s just in no way shape or form triple-A, except for looking rather snazzy.
The worst offense to me though is how there’s no magic in the game. Just guns with weird graphics. They managed to not make the magic feel like, well, magic. That’s the big flaw of it to me. Everything else is minor by comparison. Still, not a bad game, just not a good one either. At least for me.
Just FYI, the term triple-A doesn’t refer directly to the quality of the game. It simply means it was made by a larger, well-established company.
The terms have changed a bit over time, but generally “AAA” now means (in the industry) a large studio makes a game with a large marketing budget. If you think of those games that are published by EA, but made by one of their smaller studios and has a smaller marketing budget, that’s “AA”.
Much like “alpha” and “beta”, the meanings are changing so quickly it’s hard to keep up with what the industry means and what players mean.
I’m so old when I started in games “alpha” meant a feature complete game with a few crash bugs, and beta meant no (25% repro, or whatever the studio chose) crash bugs and all assets added and working.
Now it’s basically “alpha” means a demo, and “beta” means they’re buying time for GM release.
I agree 100%. The magic was not magic. It was just different looking guns. Which made the game seem more dull to me. Even if it was an okay shooter.
Is there “ammo”? I know there’s like a reload/recharge system isn’t there?
I tried the demo, it has a lot of problems outside of it being a AAA single player shooter. The “magic” system is just reskinned guns, the story is nonsensical at times, and the movement is stiff and slow. It’s like they never play tested the game and just said it was done one day. That’s not even mentioning the almost ten minute walk around the city at the beginning doing nothing but following what I will assume is a non critical character to the plot.
They cleaned a lot of that up, at least on the console version I played. And that character ends up being quite critical to the plot. You also revisit that city later in the game, so that intro serves to establish the setting and starts the plot.
My God they cleaned it up?! I can’t imagine it being a longer intro. The fact that you revisit the city later is just disappointing, that city was terrible in it’s design.
I remember Half-Life 2 opening with a walk around a city, and it was so memorable to me. I guess in part because it was reliant on its own atmosphere, and still let the player be an interactive part of it rather than bound to a tight track.
“a AAA single-player shooter in today’s market was a truly awful idea”
Fucking what? Why? What in the actual fuck?
Because EA games is weak. It’s all retreads of ancient franchises or bloated games with no risks taken.
All dictated by management with zero input from anyone else. I get sad for developer’s working for EA. Having zero influence on the games they make. I believe that everyone can have a great idea or a solution to a problem no matter what department they’re in.
Lots of developers have overlapping skills from making they’re own games that aren’t being utilised.
Working under EA is probably alot like working for McDonald’s, yeah if they did it ‘this way’ they would sell more burgers but good luck getting your voice heard.
What part of this game fits your statement here?
Did you read the post? I think the well formatted and easy to read bullet pointed list explains it
Because EA games is weak. It’s all retreads of ancient franchises or bloated games with no risks taken.
Which part of this sentence fits this game.
I would love an AAA single player shooter. If it is done well and fun. So no chance EA could do it
Not at that price point, of course. Ultrakill has a sub 2 million USD budget, its one of the most critically praised games on Steam, and its not even finished yet. I can’t look up Steamcharts at work but I have good reason to believe its more than made back its production budget.
Live service games are starting to turn into a very expensive scam and if you can’t make a good single player game, you need to cut costs somewhere. AAA production budgets are just too huge and the product isn’t good.
Obligatory, I fucking love Ultrakill graaah
If you don’t have a vision, don’t try to turn money into more money by making a game. Everyone loses. Dumping money on assets doesn’t make your trope copy/paste any better than the other million cheap Chinese clones on an app store.
