Immortals of Aveum, a singleplayer shooter that released last year, totally flopped, and one person who worked on it reckons that “trying to make a triple-A singleplayer shooter in today’s market was a truly awful idea.”
If you also subject yourself to the crucible that is social media discourse, you may have seen one or more of the following statements about that comment and what the fate of this one wizard shooter means for gaming as a whole:
Singleplayer games are dyingActually, the games industry is failing because it spends millions making games like Immortals of Aveum instead of smaller, cheaper gamesActually, Immortals of Aveum just wasn’t marketed enough
To all of those conclusions, I say: Nah, probably not.
Singleplayer games aren’t dying (obviously)
This one doesn’t need much debunking: Some of the games that made the most money on Steam last year were Starfield, Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, and Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. Singleplayer shooter Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is currently one of the most wishlisted games on Steam, and PC Gamer’s most anticipated game right now.
I could go on for the rest of this article about all the cool big and small singleplayer games we’re blessed with these days, but I’ll just point to our reviews section and let that suffice.
Big-budget games aren’t dying, either
Larian produced some great games before Baldur’s Gate 3, including PC Gamer’s 2017 Game of the Year, but BG3 is by far its greatest commercial success. I’d wager that the D&D license and all the animated smooching had a great deal to do with that.
Making big expensive games is clearly still a viable, if risky, path to commercial success. Would Rockstar be wise to tone down the scale for Grand Theft Auto 6? Are we going to tell Hideo Kojima he ought to stop putting famous actors in performance capture rigs? It’s his whole thing! And it’s not like they’re made in lieu of smaller games, of which there are loads—look at our GOTYs from last year for just a few examples.
I’m not convinced ‘more marketing’ is the answer
On a recent episode of podcast Remap Radio, Immortals of Aveum studio founder Bret Robbins acknowledged that Aveum was dealt a cruel hand by the release date gods, coming out in between Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield, and that public awareness was low. He hopes it can still find success.
If it had come out in another year, maybe Immortals of Aveum would’ve sold better, but I sort of doubt that another $10 million worth of marketing from publisher EA would’ve done the trick. Lots of people are talking about Immortals now, and it’s on sale for $23.99, but it still isn’t rising to the top of Steam’s top sellers list.
Some games just flop
The Immortals of Aveum studio has been accused of “learning the wrong lesson” from its financial failure, but the quote that kicked off this discourse—”trying to make a AAA singleplayer shooter in today’s market was a truly awful idea”—didn’t come from Robbins. It was said by an anonymous former employee who spoke to IGN.
Robbins himself is all about singleplayer shooters. At a preview event for Immortals of Aveum (see, EA did promote it), I asked him why he chose to make such an old-fashioned FPS campaign, because it reminded me a little of mid-2000s Xbox 360 games. He said that “well-crafted, scripted” experiences are just what he likes to make. Robbins was previously the creative director of Dead Space and worked on a trio of Call of Dutys.
An early Immortals of Aveum boss fight. (Image credit: Ascendant Studios)
It’s a respectable passion, but I’m not surprised that a Call of Duty-style campaign with a story inspired by the waning Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t succeed in 2023. I don’t think “AAA singleplayer shooter” is a dead genre—we’ve established that Stalker 2 looks sick—but I think it’s certainly harder today than it was in the 2000s to get by on a linear campaign with nice graphics and a dude with magic powers. Immortals of Aveum’s old-fashioned (in videogame timescales) design needed another hook, and its puppy-eyed YA novel protagonist wasn’t it.
Dead Space creator Glen Schofield had a similar problem last year with The Callisto Protocol, which also didn’t sell. Judas, the upcoming BioShock-like game from Ken Levine, probably has a better shot at commercial success, because people will come for the Levine plot twist if nothing else, but it doesn’t feel like a sure hit—not like BioShock Infinite did 10 years ago.
What I’ve played of Immortals of Aveum wasn’t bad—I was even surprised to find that I liked some of the dialogue from its precocious wizard hero—but quality of execution is no guarantee of success. If it were, the Zork series wouldn’t have ended with the excellent Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Some games are just flops!
