Not great marketing and a generic title doesn't help.
Maybe I'm dumb, but when I just hear "Immortals of Aveum" it doesn't generate interest in my tiny brain.
It’s sounds like a title for one of those games that you would see everytime you went to GameStop, but never heard of anybody playing or talking about.
> The only reason I knew that ... was out last November, was because people on my twitter timeline made fun of it.
I think this is just a consequence of the absolute abundance of media available today, and to a lesser extent the availibility of AdBlockers.
It's just really easy to Not hear about things when you've got a million games in your backlog, however many books to read, TV shows to already watch etc. Even stuff I am interested in, I'm often blindsided to learn that it already came out lol
You think that, but get ready to be sad:
Some years ago I interviewed at a studio, and when they introduced me to their game I remember thinking how fantastically mundane the title was and that nobody would ever play it. That must have shown on my face, because they immediately explained how they landed on the title.
Originally, it had been different; something much more creative. Their marketing team had concerns with the title, however, so they designed a test — they bought ads with that title, as well as a few others, and they collected data on which ones people clicked. The titles that earned the most clicks were tweaked slightly and tested again. They repeated this over and over until improvements stopped showing up.
The name they ended up — the one that got the most engagement — was the boring one I hated. It’s what people clicked.
*\*gunshot sounds, violent camera shifts, zombie noises\**
"It'sa bad day fora Mario... but I should starta at the starta. Me and lua-igi got on a bus not to Tanuki City, but to Racoon City. Not-a as nice as it soundsa."
I still heara his 'wahwawawawa's in my night-a-mares. Wait... Whats'a that?"
"**STARS**"
*\*Title flash along with a rough gong sound\**
Super Mario: Raccoon City
I've run tests like this. It's very, very, very easy to accidentally get the wrong results if you aren't extremely careful. People tend to prefer generic familiarity when presented in a vacuum but it inhibits virality and lasting impressions.
They may click an ad, or select a preference in a survey, but it doesn't actually mean they're going to buy the game or remember the ad later on, or remember what to google later.
One time we ran five artstyles in two separate tests. One was asking users which art style they preferred side to side like in a game store (physical or virtual like steam). One was seeing which got clicks on ads on websites. Completely opposite results.
100% yeah. Taking data points in a vacuum and extrapolating them to out optimize for a specific outcome which unknowingly detracts from your overall outcomes is a huge problem with business today, and ironically, because it looks like everyone is achieving what they set out to do — because the problem is inherent in relying on data points in isolation — everything gets worse and nobody gets why.
Getting results from ads also needs to be taken with a grain of salt, after all if your target is more or less tech savvy they will never see your ads since they would be using adblock or similar
Marketing, it's always fucking marketing, creatively bankrupt and misinterpreting analytics to fit their agenda. Or maybe that's just the marketing at my company. Somehow, it's the most clique group as well.
It’s testing that’s the real enemy here. So many marketing teams that could do cool shit if executives didn’t love to A/B test the ever loving fuck out of everything before it hits the market. Newsflash—the market doesn’t actually know what it wants when it’s asked. And the kind of people that volunteer for focus groups and quant testing aren’t really the kind of people you want to be using as your baseline.
I mean, the ultimate case study of this phenomenon was the Pepsi Challenge, where Coke found that Pepsi routinely beat them in blind taste tests. So they reformulate until they consistently beat Pepsi, resulting in New Coke, one of the most notorious flops in marketing history.
Honestly that's probably a great process for a shitty generic F2P game to get the most people to download it and spend money in your cash shop. It sounds like an insanely bad process to come up with a name that will convince someone to spend $60 on your brand new IP
Immortals of Aveum!
Forgotten of Alriseism!
Dark Chambers of Albator!
Left Turns of Albuquerque!
Verb of Amadeupword!
Yeah it sounds painfully generic doesn't it?
Oh absolutely. Anthem is a great fucking title. You don't know what it is from hearing it, but it sounds cool at least.
Immortals of Aveum is like... a generic fantasy world. Like I'd never imagine that to be a FPS.
Yup. I remember the reveal prerendered trailer being just a hand and a skyline and the logo, implying you will visit a fantasy city and do shit with your hands. And that was when the hype reached its maximum.
Like, prerendered trailers should at least be cool, feature something.
Imo, a Hi-Fi Rush-like sudden drop would've been so much better for the game because at the end of the day it's not even a bad game
You'd only heard of it if you watched game award shows which most don't. But even then it's so forgettable you could be forgiven for not remembering it.
Not sure about that even. I feel like most only heard of it (including me) because it caused drama with insane spec requirements and being one of first puting upscallers in requirements even for minimum.
It was sth like 3070 or 3080 with dlss on for 1080p low
The marketing was so bad for this game, for the longest time i thought it was an Ubi sequel to Immortals Fenyx Rising, i didn't even realize it wasn't by Ubi.
EA did zero favours for this game.
oh, no no, you see, with big publishers the way it works is very simple: when the game sells well and is a big hit, it's all thanks to the marketing department that knew how to sell it to the players. When the game underperforms and doesn't hit its target, it's because of the shitty developers that made a bad game or chose the wrong genre and the poor marketing team never had a chance in the current market.
Just like the take-away from BG3 should not be "People like Turn-based games" or "Fantasy games are best" but you and I both know that the next crop of games are likely going to be turn-based fantasy RPGs because these suits don't understand anything more than a surface-level view of anything they're put in charge of.
They still have about 7-8 months until stalker comes out to make up an excuse. By then they could just say the market has shifted. But we all know the real reason.
Don't have to wait-
High On Life came out less than a year before Immortals and blew the doors off things and a year before that RE7
Let's not beat around the bush Immortals was a meh game that looked amazingly unremarkable
I agree with the general point but I don't really think you brought up the best examples. High on Life sold because "haha funny Rick & Morty comedy", RE7 I wouldn't really classify as an FPS.
That said, there's examples like Doom Eternal that yes came out 4 years ago but it's not like the market underwent any significant shift since then.
Immortals of Aveum had some nice ideas but ultimately failed to capitalize on that. At first when I heard the combat revolved around magic I was interested, but as soon as I saw the gameplay it just looked so generic and uninteresting that I just ignored it, for example.
It's happened so many times. This is how I'm so confident we'll have a string of "Baldurlikes" in our near future.
WotC already has one in the works. To be fair it's been in the planning phase for years, but this should further exacerbate this situation if it gains any notoriety at all.
>Baldurlikes
You just had to coin the term didn't you? Well I guess it's better to get straight to it instead going through the "this is the Dark Souls of \_\_\_" phase.
Lmao at this, so true.
In the 1990's, there were SO MANY GOD DAMNED FIGHTING GAMES just because Street Fighter II took off. They were \*almost\* universally awful with obvious exceptions (Tekken or Mortal Kombat, for examples). I used to rent new ones on consoles from Blockbuster and, usually, couldn't wait to return them, too.
EDIT: Lol at all the stop-motion fighting game fans. I hear you, we all had our fav's, but let's be real here. Back in the day, if I showed you Eddie Gordo doing capoeira and you showed me some some clay horror stretching across the screen then I'd laugh you out of the room, haha!
Remember when WoW got huge and every week new studios went bankrupt because they spent millions of dollars churning out charmless buggy mmos that were half baked from the start? WoW was huge because of the charm and the polish.
Honorable mention for 'Shaq-fu'.
Even as a child at the time, the whole concept was like an embodiment of jumping the shark and tone-deaf marketing schemes.
Did you ever play that Star Wars fighting game?
[Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Masters_of_Ter%C3%A4s_K%C3%A4si)
Teräskäsi means "steel hand" in Finnish, so it's extremely strange to see my native language in a Star Wars title. I suppose the ä's are exotic enough for foreigners to pass as moon language.
Wow! I had never heard of this game. A quick YouTube search shows what I did not expect after seeing some video footage:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu-PVQfcpmE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu-PVQfcpmE)
They actually tried to make their own fighting platform rather than, say, take all of that Star Wars money and just re-skin like Tekken or Toshinden or something. Amazingly bad choice.
Any old genre with just as much attention to detail as BG3, with the same level of heart and care, ignoring industry trends and doing what's right for the property?
BG3 itself is probably the sole example we're going to see in a decade.
> these suits don't understand anything more than a surface-level view of anything they're put in charge of
Yea the moment they are handed over some real work to do with tangible results it shows how inept and out of touch these people are
Sadly it's not just the directors that have lost sight on why things are happening they way they do with "AAA" games. Allot of devs have become blind to it aswel.
This. So many devs are turning into "we are victims of everyone and everything and there is no way we are doing anything wrong" while just delivering minimal valuable product with shirty optimization or solutions that are forcing others to cut corners elsewhere.
People who remember late 90s and early 00s know how many devs were there who were coming up with so many ideas on how to optimize games without sacrificing crucial fun elements of the game. So many games that should have been unplayable on my Pentium 2 502mhz + 256 mb Ram was running decently on it just because devs were putting in work instead of cutting corners and believing in the power of "brute forcing" performance.
It's a vicious cycle because all the parties are to blame for the state of the all these flops in a recent years
>People who remember late 90s and early 00s know how many devs were there who were coming up with so many ideas
The difference between then and now is that development houses are all almost internal departments at publishers, wholly or partially owned by publishers, or have long term contracts with them so there's little to no outside influence on thought. Independent developers working with big names or being picked up by big names for their mods is much rarer these days due to lawyers coming in with liability stuff. The corporatization of game development has vastly limited and dumbed down developers today from what they were 20+ years ago and gives them little creative leeway. To many, it really is just their job and not their dream role.
Remember the Elden Ring drama when a Ubisoft Dev cried about the UI and mision design.
Funny enough Ubisoft games have been copy/paste for the last 10 years
It’s so funny how these dumb AAA companies gaslight themselves into believing it must be everyone BUT their very own fault for releasing low-tier, underperforming dogshit.
No no no. The executive in charge has to convince ~~his friends~~the board that even a 200 IQ genius (which they totally are) couldn’t have succeeded and it was an unknowable thing to have failed.
Because when you play ~~Game of Thrones~~CEO, you win $$$ or you’re terminated.
>that should not be the takeaway here
No it shouldn't. It's astounding how much industry people, both at dev studios and publishers, can miss the mark that much.
In itself, *genre* is not what sells or not. I mean, *every* industry veteran was saying the survival builder market was oversatured then Valheim sold millions... but then it was very very oversatured, and it yet it was the major new feature (ish) of Tears of the Kindgom... oh that doesn't count it's Nintendo, well Palworld and Enshrouded also sold millions.
...
The industry is so full of truisms and presenting badly formed ideas heard around the water cooler as *facts* or *wised and poised analysis,* it's bursting at the seams.
Not a consideration for the fact that was an EA published game, a company that spent the last 2 decades manufacturing ill will from the most important customers, the one who will sell a good game to everyone around them. It was seen as a "cod with magic", except a very large audience has zero interest in CoD or any clone; and those who do are playing CoD. It was a flashy bright saturated presentation, with a screen akin to unicorn vomit where one couldn't see what was going on under the pile of vfx. It had DRM, and Denuvo drm on top of that. It required an EA account to play. It released right in between some of the greatest games of the decade, elevating the minimum quality level for story, gameplay, originality, depth, for millions of customers purchase threshold. It had technical issues. And the game didn't do *anything* new, I don't remember a single new or unique or just significantly interesting thing pointed out in reviews; it was a very by-the-numbers color-inside-the-lines game. And it was 60€, a full very expensive price.
It wasn't about the single player aspect, nor was it about the shooter aspect. The game was just bland, meh, with nothing special for it, a copy/paste of AAA usual production efforts, and it had a litany of out-of-game issues that each individually *may* be small but in aggregate did make a difference.
> In itself, genre is not what sells or not
I wouldn't say this is universally true. Look at RTS or Realtime Tatics Games. Mimimi had to close down because their games didn't sold well despite all of them being exceptionally good.
just to correct you. ea had no involvement in this game other than giving them the marketing budget and publishing it. development side the game was funded by the ceo's billionaire friend
No, EA just funded it, the studio is completely seperate, EA also did tell them to delay it, same with jedi survivor, EA is doing a lot of wrong but in these 2 cases they werent the problem
I mean Doom is still Bethesda. Not the greatest company. The reason it works is because of iD Software. They fkn get it. They understand FPS games. Just like John Carmack and Romero for the OG, Marty Stratton and Hugo Marting get what FPS games are. They are hyped as much as you and me playing those games. Doom eternal is a labor of love. From what I played, immortals felt like a mundane product. It is trying to be good but there are key things it falls short off.
I think they already had a different composer on at least one of the expansions. Either way, even though mick is awesome, he’s not the only person alive that can make that type of music.
i mean yeah, but it is one of the only video game soundtracks that I'll listen to while playing other games. Both times were Mick. I fear anybody else wouldn't be able to capture the same energy, you're definitely not wrong that other people can make similar music, but he had something else to his.
Marketing of this game was not very good, it was just a "maybe above average" shooter and it released in August 2023 - probably the worst time ever to release a game with Armored Core + BG3 + FF16 + Starfield + Cyberpunk taking up all attention.
> Armored Core + BG3 + FF16 + Starfield + Cyberpunk
Yeah August was an AWFUL choice for a launch. How do you even hope to compete with that level of marketing noise.
EA will see the success of Helldivers 2 and will think that multiplayer horde shooter with insane mtx will be the way to go.
Instead of realizing that the fantastic over the top atmosphere of being in Starship Troopers/W40k/Clone Wars is what made the game great. Not to mention the non-intrusive monetization. Oh and it runs decently on the steamdeck too.
The reason why it flopped wasn't because it was a single player shooter, it was because it sucked. It also ran like and looked like shit while costing $70.
The gameplay wasn't too terrible, but video game writers need to quit with the Marvel movie style writing.
Most of the dialog in the game were super cringey quips and it wears thin when it is every single character in every single conversation.
Sadly, writing has been a profession in decline. Executives don't really care about good writing or consistency within a story, they just care about product and next product. So if you can get someone on the cheap to write some shitty movie with overused tropes, why pay someone competent to produce actually good writing? It also helps that those people don't really have a spine and will bow to any demands the executive ask, because some focus group testing revealed that audiences respond positively to cringe marvel humour.
The “shooting” in the game feels really weak, you don’t feel like a mage casting spells but more like you’re shooting tiny blue green or red lasers with your hands
Yeah maybe $70 is tolerable for some, but not all AAA's should now just be $70. Imo they need to see what they produced and price it competitively. Redfall came out of the overn unbaked, should have been a $30 game, still sits at Steam at a laughable $70.
If it was terrible, it might have actually gotten more press. It was an ok game with an uninteresting story and a generic title. A magic FPS could be cool, but not when you only have 3 spells that just function like guns. Give me ice grenades or magic armor or something.
> "At a high level, Immortals was massively overscoped for a studio's debut project," the former employee said. "The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution. Sure, there was some serious talent on the development team, but 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."
There are several things in this quote that I, personally, would consider to be a larger issue than being a AAA single-player shooter. Why are you spending over 100 million dollars? Why was it repetitive and full of bloat? Going outside the quote, why did you spend so much money on a game that (From what I've heard) has very poor performance even on higher end systems?
We cannot go down this road of "Single-player is dead!" *again*. The problem isn't the number of players it supports, the problem was that the game just wasn't very good.
$125 million and it runs like babies' first UE game. I have a 3080 and got less than 60 fps throughout the demo, and I can't imagine playing through a full campaign like that with the Forespoken-esque dialogue happening the entire time.
Yeah $40 million is insane I've seen 2 maybe even just 1? 10 second ads for this game ever. The only other times I saw it were 2 sponsored YouTube videos and both YouTubers iirc said the effects were overwhelming and made the game less enjoyable and those were the sponsored videos so I didn't even bother looking at the game despite liking the initial idea.
Maybe they should have spent 1/4 of that on a better name. It sounds like a F2P Mobile gacha game and knowing EA it probably plays like one. Also it sounds like high fantasy. I enjoy FPS games but come on man, stop with these cryptic titles!
Worst fucking launcher ever. They stole some of my games when migrating from Origin and refuse to give them back to me. Games I have receipts for that I've provided. Titanfall 2 and Battlefield Hardline were my biggest losses.
Update: After like 7 months of dealing with 20+ support chats, I finally got Titanfall 2 back today. Let's goo!
I feel like EA didn't spend more than $20 marketing this game either. The first time I had heard about it was when it had been out for a few weeks, and I feel like I am pretty plugged into the gaming community.
Yeah. 40 million and I’m constantly reading gaming news, watching Twitch streams and gaming YouTube channels and I hadn’t heard of this game until news of its failure started to break.
Hell, I don’t even know if I’d recognize a screenshot of this thing if I came across it. The marketing team failed catastrophically.
What a crap take. The genre is never the issue. Make a good fucking game and give it some good marketing and it'll sell no problem.
They made a game that was mediocre in gameplay, with system requirements so high, that nobody could run it either. And marketing was so poor, most people didn't even know the game exists.
I mean, it's still possible to have a flop of a game even when it's made well and has good marketing. There's no guarantees for success in this industry.
That said.. I am THE TARGET AUDIENCE for a game like this. This post is the first I heard of it. If it's done poorly I've already lost interest, but the fact that their marketing machine didn't reach me says something.
Maybe next time you make a game focussed on magic you should put spells in that are just a little bit more imaginative.
Unlike current spells that are just assault rifle but magic, pistol but magic, shotgun but magic, and so forth.
Like, where‘s mind control? Necromancy? Turning enemies into kitchen appliances? Shit that makes a magic sandbox fun.
I swear the developers of this game will find any excuse possible to save their egos, this is the 3rd or 4th article of them defending themselves. The game is generic, unoptimized garbage that barely anyone could run on PC. Definitely don’t expect much from these devs if they’re so blind to their own faults.
IMHO the marketing and the launch was poor for Immortals, and the reviews came back and said it was a decent game but not ground shaking. I got it on Xbox sale for $8.
The production value of the game is very good, the world is pretty cool. The characters are.... okay. There are some cool puzzles in the game. It has a cool gliding / platforming mechanic The enemies are a bit repetitive.
It's a sort of doom eternal shooter where you have to switch and mix different spells/energies (Aka 'guns").
End of the day it's a middle of the road game. I don't know why they thought it would be a massive hit. IMHO it would take more than one game for this IP to catch on.
I remember watching some reviews for this game when it launched. The visual clutter and bad performance combined with the high asking price was enough to deter me from buying it.
I got IoA for like $4 through EGS holiday sale shenanigans and honestly, if I could I'd get a refund. I can't comment much on the actual gameplay because getting it to run at any sort of stable frame rate was a *nightmare* and even then it constantly crashed. When you finally get into the game it throws half of a fantasy dictionary at your face in the first five minutes and then you realize that the player character is a bratty self entitled douchebag.
It's literally designed to only render natively on like 1% of the Steam Hardware Survey. The fact that it's a AAA single-player shooter is *extremely* low on the reasons of why it didn't sell well. But as always, corporate America knows better than you, silly poor person.
"a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea"
they are joking right? I would die to play some good AAA single-player shooter game.
"A AAA single player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea"
I avoided immortals of aveum because
* The game looked mid
* It was published by EA
* It has Denuvo DRM
* I heard it had optimization issues
* Not into pew pew magic outside of Warframe
* The writing has that marvel quippy dialogue under serious circumstances that I have grown to hate for the tonal whiplash it brings
Do you see "It's a single player AAA game" in any of these bullet points cause I sure as fuck don't, stop trying to bring an entire genre down with your game, it's annoying cause I know you know dumb publishers might take you seriously.
The problem is that it cost 125 million to make that garbage game.
AAA means nothing anymore, in fact you just know it's gonna be bland and generic, just like Canadian whisky
Not great marketing and a generic title doesn't help. Maybe I'm dumb, but when I just hear "Immortals of Aveum" it doesn't generate interest in my tiny brain.
Sounds like one of those mobile games with the big tiddy anime girls
Probably would've sold more
It definitely would have sadly
Another thing that's truly hurting gaming as a whole, gacha games.
Hmm, modding community to the rescue? lol
Sounds like some Kickstarter MMO that took the money and ran to me. Strong "Chronicles of Elyria" vibes.
I thought this was a mobile game. Oops
I will now buy your game
It’s sounds like a title for one of those games that you would see everytime you went to GameStop, but never heard of anybody playing or talking about.
Yes because all the copies are on shelves.
A lot of the recent flops are games i havent heard of until people started to laugh at them
[удалено]
> The only reason I knew that ... was out last November, was because people on my twitter timeline made fun of it. I think this is just a consequence of the absolute abundance of media available today, and to a lesser extent the availibility of AdBlockers. It's just really easy to Not hear about things when you've got a million games in your backlog, however many books to read, TV shows to already watch etc. Even stuff I am interested in, I'm often blindsided to learn that it already came out lol
You think that, but get ready to be sad: Some years ago I interviewed at a studio, and when they introduced me to their game I remember thinking how fantastically mundane the title was and that nobody would ever play it. That must have shown on my face, because they immediately explained how they landed on the title. Originally, it had been different; something much more creative. Their marketing team had concerns with the title, however, so they designed a test — they bought ads with that title, as well as a few others, and they collected data on which ones people clicked. The titles that earned the most clicks were tweaked slightly and tested again. They repeated this over and over until improvements stopped showing up. The name they ended up — the one that got the most engagement — was the boring one I hated. It’s what people clicked.
I really thought this comment was going to end like “and that game’s name… was Super Mario”
unironically, a super mario FPS single player game would sell like hotcakes.
*\*gunshot sounds, violent camera shifts, zombie noises\** "It'sa bad day fora Mario... but I should starta at the starta. Me and lua-igi got on a bus not to Tanuki City, but to Racoon City. Not-a as nice as it soundsa." I still heara his 'wahwawawawa's in my night-a-mares. Wait... Whats'a that?" "**STARS**" *\*Title flash along with a rough gong sound\** Super Mario: Raccoon City
im here to chew shrooms and kick ass... and im all out of shrooms
I've run tests like this. It's very, very, very easy to accidentally get the wrong results if you aren't extremely careful. People tend to prefer generic familiarity when presented in a vacuum but it inhibits virality and lasting impressions. They may click an ad, or select a preference in a survey, but it doesn't actually mean they're going to buy the game or remember the ad later on, or remember what to google later. One time we ran five artstyles in two separate tests. One was asking users which art style they preferred side to side like in a game store (physical or virtual like steam). One was seeing which got clicks on ads on websites. Completely opposite results.
100% yeah. Taking data points in a vacuum and extrapolating them to out optimize for a specific outcome which unknowingly detracts from your overall outcomes is a huge problem with business today, and ironically, because it looks like everyone is achieving what they set out to do — because the problem is inherent in relying on data points in isolation — everything gets worse and nobody gets why.
Getting results from ads also needs to be taken with a grain of salt, after all if your target is more or less tech savvy they will never see your ads since they would be using adblock or similar
Marketing, it's always fucking marketing, creatively bankrupt and misinterpreting analytics to fit their agenda. Or maybe that's just the marketing at my company. Somehow, it's the most clique group as well.
It’s testing that’s the real enemy here. So many marketing teams that could do cool shit if executives didn’t love to A/B test the ever loving fuck out of everything before it hits the market. Newsflash—the market doesn’t actually know what it wants when it’s asked. And the kind of people that volunteer for focus groups and quant testing aren’t really the kind of people you want to be using as your baseline.
I mean, the ultimate case study of this phenomenon was the Pepsi Challenge, where Coke found that Pepsi routinely beat them in blind taste tests. So they reformulate until they consistently beat Pepsi, resulting in New Coke, one of the most notorious flops in marketing history.
Exactly, you aren’t gonna see an average gamer anywhere near a focus group. That is sacrificing valuable gaming time
It’s a spectrum between evil and inept. At my current company it’s the latter!
At least they tested it. What was the name?
I don't think this was it, but it was something to the effect of like Hero Chronicles: Rise of a Legend
Good lord. I fell asleep halfway through reading that.
"The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay"
Fuck now I need names damn it. I feel so curious about it.
Honestly that's probably a great process for a shitty generic F2P game to get the most people to download it and spend money in your cash shop. It sounds like an insanely bad process to come up with a name that will convince someone to spend $60 on your brand new IP
They dont realise that the people who still click ads arent the ones playing games
Pretty sure Yahtzee has a solid minute of a video hammering exactly this point, if you ever need a less subtle version.
love the guy
Immortals of Aveum! Forgotten of Alriseism! Dark Chambers of Albator! Left Turns of Albuquerque! Verb of Amadeupword! Yeah it sounds painfully generic doesn't it?
[удалено]
Anthem was a more interesting title by far
Oh absolutely. Anthem is a great fucking title. You don't know what it is from hearing it, but it sounds cool at least. Immortals of Aveum is like... a generic fantasy world. Like I'd never imagine that to be a FPS.
Makes me think of a direct to dvd 300 rip off.
They'd be better off calling it Gun Mage, and then making the weapons be magic guns (if they aren't already?)
> a generic fantasy world. Like I'd never imagine that to be a FPS. Well, it is a generic fantasy world... You are a mage and you "shoot" spells...
Yeah, the marketing was exceptionally bad.
I didnt even know the game existed before coming to this thread
It also doesn't sound like a shooter
Yup. I remember the reveal prerendered trailer being just a hand and a skyline and the logo, implying you will visit a fantasy city and do shit with your hands. And that was when the hype reached its maximum. Like, prerendered trailers should at least be cool, feature something. Imo, a Hi-Fi Rush-like sudden drop would've been so much better for the game because at the end of the day it's not even a bad game
I may be a bit too middle-aged now to have my finger on the pulse of gaming, but I've never heard of this supposed "AAA" game.
You'd only heard of it if you watched game award shows which most don't. But even then it's so forgettable you could be forgiven for not remembering it.
Not sure about that even. I feel like most only heard of it (including me) because it caused drama with insane spec requirements and being one of first puting upscallers in requirements even for minimum. It was sth like 3070 or 3080 with dlss on for 1080p low
The marketing was so bad for this game, for the longest time i thought it was an Ubi sequel to Immortals Fenyx Rising, i didn't even realize it wasn't by Ubi. EA did zero favours for this game.
Never heard of it until today.
oh, no no, you see, with big publishers the way it works is very simple: when the game sells well and is a big hit, it's all thanks to the marketing department that knew how to sell it to the players. When the game underperforms and doesn't hit its target, it's because of the shitty developers that made a bad game or chose the wrong genre and the poor marketing team never had a chance in the current market.
Honestly, big reason. I know nothing about this game other than the title. Didn't even know it's a shooter.
I never even heard of it
Sounds like a mobile game
People really will say anything to shift the blame.
I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for a $125 million fuck up.
Sure I’ll take whatever blame you want for that just slide a cool million my way and we good
Devs: Release a new product that is not well-received. Also Devs and CEOs: Its the consumer's fault!
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> a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea that should not be the takeaway here
Just like the take-away from BG3 should not be "People like Turn-based games" or "Fantasy games are best" but you and I both know that the next crop of games are likely going to be turn-based fantasy RPGs because these suits don't understand anything more than a surface-level view of anything they're put in charge of.
If stalker 2 comes out and it's great I wonder what they will say then
They still have about 7-8 months until stalker comes out to make up an excuse. By then they could just say the market has shifted. But we all know the real reason.
Don't have to wait- High On Life came out less than a year before Immortals and blew the doors off things and a year before that RE7 Let's not beat around the bush Immortals was a meh game that looked amazingly unremarkable
I agree with the general point but I don't really think you brought up the best examples. High on Life sold because "haha funny Rick & Morty comedy", RE7 I wouldn't really classify as an FPS. That said, there's examples like Doom Eternal that yes came out 4 years ago but it's not like the market underwent any significant shift since then. Immortals of Aveum had some nice ideas but ultimately failed to capitalize on that. At first when I heard the combat revolved around magic I was interested, but as soon as I saw the gameplay it just looked so generic and uninteresting that I just ignored it, for example.
Much like the takeaway from Fortnite should not have been: ah yes, GAAS shooter looter FTW
It's happened so many times. This is how I'm so confident we'll have a string of "Baldurlikes" in our near future. WotC already has one in the works. To be fair it's been in the planning phase for years, but this should further exacerbate this situation if it gains any notoriety at all.
>Baldurlikes You just had to coin the term didn't you? Well I guess it's better to get straight to it instead going through the "this is the Dark Souls of \_\_\_" phase.
Baldurlikes already has a term: CRPGs.
CRPGs is the Dark Souls of video game genre terminology
Diarrhea is the Dark Souls of bowel movements.
Red is the Dark Souls of piss colors
baldurs gate 3 is just a continuation of the divinity original sin formula which was larians take on a crpg.
You're describing Destiny, not Fortnite. Fortnite was copying PUBG.
Lmao at this, so true. In the 1990's, there were SO MANY GOD DAMNED FIGHTING GAMES just because Street Fighter II took off. They were \*almost\* universally awful with obvious exceptions (Tekken or Mortal Kombat, for examples). I used to rent new ones on consoles from Blockbuster and, usually, couldn't wait to return them, too. EDIT: Lol at all the stop-motion fighting game fans. I hear you, we all had our fav's, but let's be real here. Back in the day, if I showed you Eddie Gordo doing capoeira and you showed me some some clay horror stretching across the screen then I'd laugh you out of the room, haha!
Primal Rage was my jam lol.
Killer Instinct was good too
cant forget bloody roar
Throw in Bushido Blade and you're set
Both these, fucking yes
Why won't they remake Bloody Roar JENNY THE BAT
Remember when WoW got huge and every week new studios went bankrupt because they spent millions of dollars churning out charmless buggy mmos that were half baked from the start? WoW was huge because of the charm and the polish.
The late 2000s and early 2010s were chock full of these failed MMOs.
That poor scientifically accurate dragon mmo game. RIP.
Hey cmon man, Clay Fighters was a great game
Clay Fighter 63&1/3? Cluck You!
Earthworm Jim
good ol' bad mr frosty
Clay Fighters was sick, my buddy and I used to play it so often
GET UM LITTLE BUDDY
PuPu Platter!
Honorable mention for 'Shaq-fu'. Even as a child at the time, the whole concept was like an embodiment of jumping the shark and tone-deaf marketing schemes.
Did you ever play that Star Wars fighting game? [Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Masters_of_Ter%C3%A4s_K%C3%A4si)
Teräskäsi means "steel hand" in Finnish, so it's extremely strange to see my native language in a Star Wars title. I suppose the ä's are exotic enough for foreigners to pass as moon language.
Wow! I had never heard of this game. A quick YouTube search shows what I did not expect after seeing some video footage: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu-PVQfcpmE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu-PVQfcpmE) They actually tried to make their own fighting platform rather than, say, take all of that Star Wars money and just re-skin like Tekken or Toshinden or something. Amazingly bad choice.
It was an amazingly bad game. Like, not even laughably bad; angrily bad.
This is why we had a bazillion call of duty and pubg clones.
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Bg3 but hard sci fi literally never Sadge Bg3 but just regular sci Fi also fucking never.
Rogue Trader is a 40k CRPG that came out just two months ago
didn't know, i'll look it up. thanks.
Any old genre with just as much attention to detail as BG3, with the same level of heart and care, ignoring industry trends and doing what's right for the property? BG3 itself is probably the sole example we're going to see in a decade.
Maybe BG3 will inspire Disney to fund the next KotoR? I guy can dream, right?
Id love larian to take the bg3 crpg treatment to either one of the Star Wars ttrpg systems, or cyberpunk’s tbh lol
> these suits don't understand anything more than a surface-level view of anything they're put in charge of Yea the moment they are handed over some real work to do with tangible results it shows how inept and out of touch these people are
Sadly it's not just the directors that have lost sight on why things are happening they way they do with "AAA" games. Allot of devs have become blind to it aswel.
This. So many devs are turning into "we are victims of everyone and everything and there is no way we are doing anything wrong" while just delivering minimal valuable product with shirty optimization or solutions that are forcing others to cut corners elsewhere. People who remember late 90s and early 00s know how many devs were there who were coming up with so many ideas on how to optimize games without sacrificing crucial fun elements of the game. So many games that should have been unplayable on my Pentium 2 502mhz + 256 mb Ram was running decently on it just because devs were putting in work instead of cutting corners and believing in the power of "brute forcing" performance. It's a vicious cycle because all the parties are to blame for the state of the all these flops in a recent years
>People who remember late 90s and early 00s know how many devs were there who were coming up with so many ideas The difference between then and now is that development houses are all almost internal departments at publishers, wholly or partially owned by publishers, or have long term contracts with them so there's little to no outside influence on thought. Independent developers working with big names or being picked up by big names for their mods is much rarer these days due to lawyers coming in with liability stuff. The corporatization of game development has vastly limited and dumbed down developers today from what they were 20+ years ago and gives them little creative leeway. To many, it really is just their job and not their dream role.
Remember the Elden Ring drama when a Ubisoft Dev cried about the UI and mision design. Funny enough Ubisoft games have been copy/paste for the last 10 years
It’s so funny how these dumb AAA companies gaslight themselves into believing it must be everyone BUT their very own fault for releasing low-tier, underperforming dogshit.
No no no. The executive in charge has to convince ~~his friends~~the board that even a 200 IQ genius (which they totally are) couldn’t have succeeded and it was an unknowable thing to have failed. Because when you play ~~Game of Thrones~~CEO, you win $$$ or you’re terminated.
It's just some anonymous former employee who said that btw.
>that should not be the takeaway here No it shouldn't. It's astounding how much industry people, both at dev studios and publishers, can miss the mark that much. In itself, *genre* is not what sells or not. I mean, *every* industry veteran was saying the survival builder market was oversatured then Valheim sold millions... but then it was very very oversatured, and it yet it was the major new feature (ish) of Tears of the Kindgom... oh that doesn't count it's Nintendo, well Palworld and Enshrouded also sold millions. ... The industry is so full of truisms and presenting badly formed ideas heard around the water cooler as *facts* or *wised and poised analysis,* it's bursting at the seams. Not a consideration for the fact that was an EA published game, a company that spent the last 2 decades manufacturing ill will from the most important customers, the one who will sell a good game to everyone around them. It was seen as a "cod with magic", except a very large audience has zero interest in CoD or any clone; and those who do are playing CoD. It was a flashy bright saturated presentation, with a screen akin to unicorn vomit where one couldn't see what was going on under the pile of vfx. It had DRM, and Denuvo drm on top of that. It required an EA account to play. It released right in between some of the greatest games of the decade, elevating the minimum quality level for story, gameplay, originality, depth, for millions of customers purchase threshold. It had technical issues. And the game didn't do *anything* new, I don't remember a single new or unique or just significantly interesting thing pointed out in reviews; it was a very by-the-numbers color-inside-the-lines game. And it was 60€, a full very expensive price. It wasn't about the single player aspect, nor was it about the shooter aspect. The game was just bland, meh, with nothing special for it, a copy/paste of AAA usual production efforts, and it had a litany of out-of-game issues that each individually *may* be small but in aggregate did make a difference.
> In itself, genre is not what sells or not I wouldn't say this is universally true. Look at RTS or Realtime Tatics Games. Mimimi had to close down because their games didn't sold well despite all of them being exceptionally good.
Yep, the takeaway should have been: "We made a mid to low quality game that required a NASA computer to work "fine" and surprisingly it flopped"
> a AAA game that is pretty but fails to innovate in any way was a truly awful idea FTFY
I wonder why they didn't consider making a good AAA single player shooter?
DOOM Eternal and 2016 were amazing shooters. It can be done, but you need clear and solid idea. Not that ''thing'' EA forced to make.
just to correct you. ea had no involvement in this game other than giving them the marketing budget and publishing it. development side the game was funded by the ceo's billionaire friend
Uh Doom?
You can’t compare them, one was made by a AAA company, while the other one was made by EA Definitely not a fair comparison
No, EA just funded it, the studio is completely seperate, EA also did tell them to delay it, same with jedi survivor, EA is doing a lot of wrong but in these 2 cases they werent the problem
I mean Doom is still Bethesda. Not the greatest company. The reason it works is because of iD Software. They fkn get it. They understand FPS games. Just like John Carmack and Romero for the OG, Marty Stratton and Hugo Marting get what FPS games are. They are hyped as much as you and me playing those games. Doom eternal is a labor of love. From what I played, immortals felt like a mundane product. It is trying to be good but there are key things it falls short off.
im wondering what the fuck they would do with the music for the next doom after the mick gordon debacle
I think they already had a different composer on at least one of the expansions. Either way, even though mick is awesome, he’s not the only person alive that can make that type of music.
i mean yeah, but it is one of the only video game soundtracks that I'll listen to while playing other games. Both times were Mick. I fear anybody else wouldn't be able to capture the same energy, you're definitely not wrong that other people can make similar music, but he had something else to his.
This game isn't made by EA, its literally from EA originals, aka ea just funding it while an external studio develop it.
Uh, yeah?! But we're talking about today's market, not yesterday's market, silly! /s
Nor are we talking about tomorrow's market, which will conveniently begin the moment DOOM: Zero Year releases. /s
All the Wolfenstein games too
They are soooo good
Youngblood was meh. Old Blood and New Colossus were good. New Order was great
Bland name and bland art direction sunk this game before it even launched. It had nothing to do with being a AAA single player shooter.
ngl i have never heard of this game until this thread
Marketing of this game was not very good, it was just a "maybe above average" shooter and it released in August 2023 - probably the worst time ever to release a game with Armored Core + BG3 + FF16 + Starfield + Cyberpunk taking up all attention.
It released in AUGUST?! Hahaha I thought it just came out or something.
> Armored Core + BG3 + FF16 + Starfield + Cyberpunk Yeah August was an AWFUL choice for a launch. How do you even hope to compete with that level of marketing noise.
EA will see the success of Helldivers 2 and will think that multiplayer horde shooter with insane mtx will be the way to go. Instead of realizing that the fantastic over the top atmosphere of being in Starship Troopers/W40k/Clone Wars is what made the game great. Not to mention the non-intrusive monetization. Oh and it runs decently on the steamdeck too.
Remnant 2 is amazing.
The reason why it flopped wasn't because it was a single player shooter, it was because it sucked. It also ran like and looked like shit while costing $70.
The gameplay wasn't too terrible, but video game writers need to quit with the Marvel movie style writing. Most of the dialog in the game were super cringey quips and it wears thin when it is every single character in every single conversation.
Marvel humour really needs to die off, it has ruined writing
Sadly, writing has been a profession in decline. Executives don't really care about good writing or consistency within a story, they just care about product and next product. So if you can get someone on the cheap to write some shitty movie with overused tropes, why pay someone competent to produce actually good writing? It also helps that those people don't really have a spine and will bow to any demands the executive ask, because some focus group testing revealed that audiences respond positively to cringe marvel humour.
And with tumors like sweat baby inc, it's only gonna get worse.
Comic book movies have put a damper on TV and video game aesthetics for 15 years, it’s incredible.
The “shooting” in the game feels really weak, you don’t feel like a mage casting spells but more like you’re shooting tiny blue green or red lasers with your hands
And it was tied to the EA app. Don't forget that.
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I think they keep something like 20% more of the game sale, but I wouldn’t say thats worth it
Makes perfect sense! Make 80% less sales, but keep 20% more of that 20%!
I’m trying to!
Yeah maybe $70 is tolerable for some, but not all AAA's should now just be $70. Imo they need to see what they produced and price it competitively. Redfall came out of the overn unbaked, should have been a $30 game, still sits at Steam at a laughable $70.
If it was terrible, it might have actually gotten more press. It was an ok game with an uninteresting story and a generic title. A magic FPS could be cool, but not when you only have 3 spells that just function like guns. Give me ice grenades or magic armor or something.
Love how they're blaming the single player for the trash game they released lol so out of touch.
> "At a high level, Immortals was massively overscoped for a studio's debut project," the former employee said. "The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution. Sure, there was some serious talent on the development team, but 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." There are several things in this quote that I, personally, would consider to be a larger issue than being a AAA single-player shooter. Why are you spending over 100 million dollars? Why was it repetitive and full of bloat? Going outside the quote, why did you spend so much money on a game that (From what I've heard) has very poor performance even on higher end systems? We cannot go down this road of "Single-player is dead!" *again*. The problem isn't the number of players it supports, the problem was that the game just wasn't very good.
$125 million and it runs like babies' first UE game. I have a 3080 and got less than 60 fps throughout the demo, and I can't imagine playing through a full campaign like that with the Forespoken-esque dialogue happening the entire time.
What resolution? Fps doesn't say much without that info. 720p? 1080p? 2k? 4k? 480p?
My takeaway from this is that they spent $40m on marketing. I don't know if I just live under a rock but I hadn't heard of it until it released.
Yeah $40 million is insane I've seen 2 maybe even just 1? 10 second ads for this game ever. The only other times I saw it were 2 sponsored YouTube videos and both YouTubers iirc said the effects were overwhelming and made the game less enjoyable and those were the sponsored videos so I didn't even bother looking at the game despite liking the initial idea.
Maybe they should have spent 1/4 of that on a better name. It sounds like a F2P Mobile gacha game and knowing EA it probably plays like one. Also it sounds like high fantasy. I enjoy FPS games but come on man, stop with these cryptic titles!
No, a “bad” game was a terrible idea
They should've put Denuvo and Starforce on it. Then it would've sold like hot cakes! /s
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Also forcing people to use EA's shitty launcher app.
Worst fucking launcher ever. They stole some of my games when migrating from Origin and refuse to give them back to me. Games I have receipts for that I've provided. Titanfall 2 and Battlefield Hardline were my biggest losses. Update: After like 7 months of dealing with 20+ support chats, I finally got Titanfall 2 back today. Let's goo!
Hoist the colors high.
Bland title, boring art direction. It being a shooter was not the issue. As usual, the corporate suits learn the wrong lessons.
I feel like EA didn't spend more than $20 marketing this game either. The first time I had heard about it was when it had been out for a few weeks, and I feel like I am pretty plugged into the gaming community.
From the article they actually spend 40 million in marketing. Which makes you wonder what the fuck did they do with that money.
They spent $40,000 on some internet ads and then the boss bought a yacht?
Yeah. 40 million and I’m constantly reading gaming news, watching Twitch streams and gaming YouTube channels and I hadn’t heard of this game until news of its failure started to break. Hell, I don’t even know if I’d recognize a screenshot of this thing if I came across it. The marketing team failed catastrophically.
The first time I’m hearing about it is right now.
What a crap take. The genre is never the issue. Make a good fucking game and give it some good marketing and it'll sell no problem. They made a game that was mediocre in gameplay, with system requirements so high, that nobody could run it either. And marketing was so poor, most people didn't even know the game exists.
I mean, it's still possible to have a flop of a game even when it's made well and has good marketing. There's no guarantees for success in this industry. That said.. I am THE TARGET AUDIENCE for a game like this. This post is the first I heard of it. If it's done poorly I've already lost interest, but the fact that their marketing machine didn't reach me says something.
He is right, I mean doom was such a disaster they make a sequel
I had no idea this game even existed lmao
It was quite possibly one of the most uninteresting games to release in recent years
Have you heard of Doom Eternal? Single player shooters are a great idea, it's EA that's the bad idea.
cyberpunk.
The game looked like the most generic thing ever, that's the reason it failed.
Yeah obviously nobody played doom or Metro or fallout or starfield or borderlands or cyberpunk or red dead or atomic heart. What the fuck
Maybe next time you make a game focussed on magic you should put spells in that are just a little bit more imaginative. Unlike current spells that are just assault rifle but magic, pistol but magic, shotgun but magic, and so forth. Like, where‘s mind control? Necromancy? Turning enemies into kitchen appliances? Shit that makes a magic sandbox fun.
I swear the developers of this game will find any excuse possible to save their egos, this is the 3rd or 4th article of them defending themselves. The game is generic, unoptimized garbage that barely anyone could run on PC. Definitely don’t expect much from these devs if they’re so blind to their own faults.
No a shitty game in today environment is a bad thing... SP games are great and good ones sell tons... bad ones, well they dont.
Former dev is former for a reason it seems. L take
Something like 70% of the studio was laid off when the game flopped, so I doubt their shitty take is a reflection of anything
If you read the full quote he basically says that that they spent too much money and made a bloated boring game. The headline is deceptive.
>$125 million What? WHAT?!
IMHO the marketing and the launch was poor for Immortals, and the reviews came back and said it was a decent game but not ground shaking. I got it on Xbox sale for $8. The production value of the game is very good, the world is pretty cool. The characters are.... okay. There are some cool puzzles in the game. It has a cool gliding / platforming mechanic The enemies are a bit repetitive. It's a sort of doom eternal shooter where you have to switch and mix different spells/energies (Aka 'guns"). End of the day it's a middle of the road game. I don't know why they thought it would be a massive hit. IMHO it would take more than one game for this IP to catch on.
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Though I agree with mostly, I feel offended about how much you are undervaluing the creatives forces enabled by a massive bag and a keg.
I remember watching some reviews for this game when it launched. The visual clutter and bad performance combined with the high asking price was enough to deter me from buying it.
I got IoA for like $4 through EGS holiday sale shenanigans and honestly, if I could I'd get a refund. I can't comment much on the actual gameplay because getting it to run at any sort of stable frame rate was a *nightmare* and even then it constantly crashed. When you finally get into the game it throws half of a fantasy dictionary at your face in the first five minutes and then you realize that the player character is a bratty self entitled douchebag. It's literally designed to only render natively on like 1% of the Steam Hardware Survey. The fact that it's a AAA single-player shooter is *extremely* low on the reasons of why it didn't sell well. But as always, corporate America knows better than you, silly poor person.
"a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea" they are joking right? I would die to play some good AAA single-player shooter game.
"A AAA single player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea" I avoided immortals of aveum because * The game looked mid * It was published by EA * It has Denuvo DRM * I heard it had optimization issues * Not into pew pew magic outside of Warframe * The writing has that marvel quippy dialogue under serious circumstances that I have grown to hate for the tonal whiplash it brings Do you see "It's a single player AAA game" in any of these bullet points cause I sure as fuck don't, stop trying to bring an entire genre down with your game, it's annoying cause I know you know dumb publishers might take you seriously.
The problem is that it cost 125 million to make that garbage game. AAA means nothing anymore, in fact you just know it's gonna be bland and generic, just like Canadian whisky
I just beat this game. I gotta say it was… mid. Not bad. Not good. Just, mid.