Another unsuccessful pile of shit with the EA name glued on the cover flopped hard resulting in yet another game development studio having its workforce culled.
Ascendant Studios, you’ve never heard of them and I don’t blame you. The development studio was apparently founded in 2018 by individuals formally of Electronic Arts, their one and only “masterpiece” being Immortals of Aveum which released only a month ago was such a catastrophic failure that the studio have already begun laying off staff members.
Published by Electronic Arts, Immortals of Aveum marks one of the first if not THE first game to be entirely developed from start to finish on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, utilizing both selling points of UE5, being Nanite and Lumen.
Rather than actually optimizing their own assets and models with retopology, Ascendant Studios opted for the simplistic solution of simply over-relying upon UE5’s Nanite technology to do the heavy lifting in reducing polycounts without adding complex shaders onto the models themselves, combine that with DENUVO anti-tamper DRM and you’ve got yourself a brilliant showcase of UE5’s cancerous performance on PC.
The game isn’t anything special, the graphics aren’t impressive or outstanding, the PC port being awash with texture popups and a whole load of stuttering, it also marks yet another game that provides slightly less shit performance on AMD Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs versus their respective NVIDIA GeForce counterparts, this could be down to the nature of Unreal Engine 5 with NVIDIA’s software scheduler being the main cause as UE5 seemingly has problems with driver overhead.
Anyways, the game sold poorly. VERY poorly, with SteamDB charts showcasing a peak player count of just 751 concurrent players on launch as the game struggles to maintain much more than 60 players on average daily.
Immortals of Aveum is simply a game that came out of nowhere, with very little if any marketing whatsoever alongside the fact that 2023 has produced quite a lot of high anticipated game releases the odds were stacked against the horrible optimized single player only first person shooter.
With such pitiful sales it comes as no surprise that developers, Ascendant Studios have already begun laying off its staff. With Ascendant Studios founder, Bret Robbins announcing on twitter that a staggering 45% of its employees have been given their marching orders barely a month after their only game has released.
The fact that publishers, EA had in fact delayed the release of the game by a month, with the original release date planned for July 20th, had it originally released as planned it might have managed to scrape at least a thousand concurrent players as the game had seemingly launched in the firing lines of Bethesda’s Starfield only a week or two prior.
EA has a long and tenured history with purchasing reputable studios and developers, only to essentially drive them into the ground and dissolve the studios outright. BlackBox, Pandemic, Visceral, Maxis, the decaying corpse of Criterion and BioWare are all either dead or dying.
Flop after flop with EA taking them all off life support shortly thereafter. I’m so glad to see that another studio has been destroyed by shacking up with Electronic Arts, RIP Ascendant Studios, you will not be missed.
