Magic shooter Immortals of Aveum has just been released globally. The initial metrics for the AAA game, developed by Ascendant Studios and published under the EA Originals program, don’t look promising.
Launched on August 22, Immortals of Aveum peaked at 751 concurrent users (CCU) on Steam, according to SteamDB. This is a pretty poor start for a AAA budget title made by veteran developers with the support of a top-tier publisher.
Immortals of Aveum barely made it to the top 100 most played Steam games of 2023. It is currently ranked as 96th title by peak CCU this year, behind many smaller projects. Of course, more players may flock to the game over the weekend, but the situation is unlikely to change significantly.
There were 86 releases on Steam this year so far that have peaked at 1,000 concurrent players or more. 24 games have a peak CCU of over 10,000, and just three titles — Hogwarts Legacy (879k), Baldur’s Gate 3 (875k), and Resident Evil 4 (168k) — have surpassed the 100k mark.
Top 20 Steam games by peak CCU in 2023 (via SteamDB)
Although peak CCU isn’t the most important metric, it is still a great transparent indicator of general player interest. And Immortals of Aveum is, unfortunately, an outsider.
Ascendant Studios and its partnership with Electronic Arts
- Ascendant Studios was founded in 2018 by Bret Robbins, an industry veteran whose portfolio includes games like Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2, Dead Space, and the Call of Duty franchise. Prior to establishing his own company, he served as the creative director at Sledgehammer Games.
- The studio’s original team consisted of several experienced developers, and Robbins also hired some staff from Telltale after it went bankrupt in 2018. Right now, Ascendant employs over 100 people.
- Financially backed by Vista Equity Parnters co-founder Brian Sheth, the independent studio wanted to create its own AAA game and eventually partnered with Electronic Arts.
- In 2022, the publisher announced that Ascendant’s debut title, Immortals of Aveum, will be released under its EA Originals label, which initially focused on publishing smaller indie games.
- This year, Immortals of Aveum and Wild Hearts, an action game from Koei Tecmo’s subsidiary Omega Force, became the first AAA projects in EA Originals’ portfolio.
- EA Partners general manager Jeff Gamon later explained that the company decided to move away “from niche, and towards bold and audacious.”
- The financial terms of the partnership between EA and Ascendant remain undisclosed, but Robbins said the publisher helped the studio “market and distribute our game because we knew they could reach the biggest audience.”
On Steam, Immortals of Aveum received mixed reviews from players, with 67% of the 165 user reviews being positive. Critic reception was also far from perfect, with Metascore ranging from 66 (PC) to 80 (Xbox). The PS5 version has the most reviews with an average score of 70.
While players generally enjoyed the gameplay and combat, negative reviews cited dialogues and overall writing as its weak sides. However, the mian criticism was directed at… many performance issues, you guessed it.
With RTX 2080 Super (!) in its minimum system requirements, Immortals of Aveum seems like another poorly optimized release. The game was supposed to showcase Unreal Engine 5.1 features, including Nanite and Lumen, but ended up running bad even on high-end PCs.
After running some tests, Wccftech found out that even upscaling technologies like FSR and DLSS don’t improve performance. With Ryzen 7 7800X3D, RTX 4090, and 32GB DDR5 RAM, Immortals of Aveum delivers an average of 69 FPS (4K, Max settings) with DLSS in Performance mode, not to mention frame drops to below 30 FPS. This just seems unacceptable in any case.