As I played through the battle-wizard FPS campaign of Immortals of Aveum I kept having a recurrent thought. “This is okay, but I can’t believe I paid $70 for it.” I didn’t. I paid $8, and that was for the deluxe edition with a bunch of game breaking equipment I never used. But I’d briefly considered buying it at $70 when it launched just a few months ago and that price was stuck in my brain as I played for some reason.

Immortals of Aveum is an okay game. It’s not broken or half baked like Golum and Skull Island. Its shooting mechanics work well and there’s a novelty to the various magical spell weapons, which seem patterned after the more exotic sci-fi arsenal of a game like Halo rather than straightforward analogs to modern guns. Some of the ancillary powers, like a beam that overloads and stuns enemies and a temporary shield you can summon and shoot through, are pretty fun and original. The progression and equipment systems are well implemented for RPG-light systems (Immortals of Aveum has more and better RPG mechanics than Final Fantasy XVI!) and there are optional puzzles and side areas to search for more loot and extra challenges. The game looks decent, if unspectacular, with aesthetics that seem to crib a lot from games like the modern God of War (specifically Alfheim) but are pleasant enough, even if performance is iffy (especially during cut scenes.) You can tell that there were budgetary limitations based on the sheer number of repeating objects and some mediocre animations, but there are moments where you are manipulating giant statutes or facing giant beasts where it can feel like a true AAA game. Writing and dialog are average, while voice acting performances are above average, especially Gina Torres hamming it up as a Field Marshal. The story is full of too many made up lore terms and really falls apart at the end, but it has its moments. The music is the one notable area where the game is actually downright bad, with short, simple, irritating repeating loops, especially while exploring out of combat. Disappointing considering how many games with absolutely tiny budgets still have amazing soundtracks these days.

Nothing went horribly wrong during the development of Immortals of Aveum. Even the music is just below average, not experience ruining. The game is pretty much what it advertises itself to be and there’s nothing particularly wrong with its conception or design either. People have criticized it for being bland and derivative, and it is a little, but there are some original ideas too. The world building pulls in concepts from high fantasy and some steampunk along with some Lovecraftian elements, and most of the characters are charming enough. The combat has been called “call of duty with spells” but it’s not. There’s no regenerating health (instead you have health crystals you break), and abilities like shield and blink encourage high mobility frenetic combat with liberal use of special abilities and resources. It’s closer to “battlemage Doom (2016)” than anything else, but even that doesn’t quite capture it because it has more puzzles, significant numbers of NPCs to chat with and non-combat areas to explore, and a less brutal difficulty curve (though there are definitely some spikes.) None of it represents a paradigm shift from what came before but it’s competently executed and it feels like a lot of mid-tier games; a remix of tried and true concepts with some unique story, aesthetic, and mechanical concepts integrated to prevent it from being a carbon copy. Immortals of Aveum scored a 69 on Metacritic, which is not a great score by any means but is just one point below a somewhat respectable 7/10. 69 is a nice score, is what I’m saying.

I don't want to downplay the game's flaws. There are a limited number of weapons and though you keep getting new ones throughout the campaign, you've seen all the different types pretty early in the campaign and the tiny range of the red mana weapons is frustrating and makes 2 out of 3 pretty worthless. Enemy variety is also limited and way too many of the bad guys are super tanky, requiring a frustatingly long time to kill. The game isn't very hard because it is liberal with health crystals but it can definitely be annoying, and though I probably died something like 20 times during the course of the campaign and never more than 3-4 times on any one encounter there were lots of times when encounters felt draining and unsatisfying because of how long it took to kill the last enemies. The story is silly and incoherent much of the time, though often in kind of a fun way. Some of the exploration and puzzle elements are frustrating because you don't always know that you lack the tools to solve a puzzle and have to go back later (The game is a semi-Metroidvania in that you can revisit old areas and use new tools to unlock additional loot chests and side content like challenge levels called Shroudfanes.) The use of three colors of magic and coding certain enemies to them is restrictive and annoying, especially because it forces you to spec your character to being able to handle a threat of any color, preventing you from specializing.

On the plus side the pacing between story, exploration, puzzles, and combat isn't bad, and the base combat is fun and satisfying. The upgrades tend to be substantial and go beyond the basic "more damage" "more armor" stuff to more interesting bonuses like making your shield regenerate your health when it takes damage. You get a decent variety of "fury" spells that take up mana and the game gives you enough mana crystals to consistently use them, making combat much more interesting than it would be if you could only rely on your base "sigil" attacks. The game held my attention and the world of Aveum is original enough that I was able to get absorbed in it for long stretches, which is something that I've been having trouble with recently for most games.

So the game is fine, if not spectacular, and it was promoted by EA with a decent advertising campaign in the standard gaming outlets. Immortals of Aveum didn’t slip under the radar from lack of attention. But it still flopped, hard, to the point where half the studio was laid off almost immediately. It was a commercial disaster. 3.5 months after launch it’s half off pretty much everywhere and 90% off on Xbox. It’ll probably be on PS+ or Game Pass within a couple more months, and while it may find an audience there to some degree it won’t be enough to turn things around meaningfully. It’s all time peak on Steam was 751 players. Compare that to High on Life, a game that was probably cheaper to make, and peaked at over 11,000, and which also premiered on Game Pass, which would likely have significantly reduced that number because you don’t use Steam to play the subscription version.

Why did Immortals of Aveum fail so badly that it crushed its studio then? Because the market has changed. Not only are there more games than ever but the best of those games are getting longer and longer, and the B-tier games have gotten much cheaper. Even ignoring extreme outliers like Baldur’s Gate, most AAA games are now well over 20 hours. According to howlongtobeat.com Far Cry 6 is almost 24 hours long, while Far Cry 3 is just over 15. That’s a big jump. The days of the 8-10 hour campaign are long gone for single player focused games and when something like Assassin’s Creed Mirage comes out with a 15 hour campaign it’s often priced at a discount (Mirage was $50). This is before we even get into live service games or other multiplayer experiences that can last hundreds of hours and soak up all a player’s time.

And from the other end of the spectrum you have lots of cheaper but still incredible experiences. Astonishingly good indie games with really nice production values, like Neon White or Death’s Door. Those slightly smaller AAA quality games like Hi-Fi Rush, Miles Morales, or big DLCs like Phantom Liberty. The aforementioned High on Life was a $50 game. And with backwards compatibility and better PC compatibility maintenance you have a massive library of older games in your backlog or available at huge discounts to explore. That’s before we get into subscriptions like Game Pass and PS+, which offer hundreds of games in a rotating library, often including some very big heavy hitters you might not have played. The days of “Well I finished my last 10 hour retail disc game, let me see what’s coming out next week” are gone.

So where does that leave games like Immortals of Aveum? As a giant flop. Asking for the same price as Baldur’s Gate 3, Spider-Man 2 or Tears of the Kingdom was never going to work, likely not even if Immortals of Aveum were a better game. Occasionally games like it (relatively short AA single player campaign) do seem to find an audience, but those seem like the exception instead of the rule, to the point where those games are getting rare. A license can help (High on Life didn’t have a license but it did have Justin Rowland pushing it, prior to his downfall) as can being part of a popular franchise, like the Dead Space remake (getting an 89 Metacritic like that game helps too, so quality can help if a game is exceptional.) Launching into Game Pass or PS+ can help but unless you’re owned by Microsoft you can’t exactly guarantee that.

It’s a shame because Immortals of Aveum isn’t really a bad game. It has some good ideas that could have been expanded on in a sequel or just another game from a now more experienced studio (this was Ascendant Studios’ first game; they may make another in their scaled down state but it won’t be at the production level of Immortals of Aveum.) I don’t think I’d be happy to have bough it at $70, but at $8 it satisfied my desire for a linear, mid-length, campaign I could sink my teeth into for a few longer play sessions and then set aside, probably never to play again. I reminded me a lot of Outriders, another game I mostly enjoyed while it lasted.

But even as someone who likes these kinds of games I don’t have a solution for their commercial failings. “Make them better,” “sell them cheaper and hope that helps,” “try to get on Game Pass or PS+” are all ideas it is impossible to reliably execute on. As a customer I’m as guilty as anyone else. I have a friend who was playing through Aveum and we sometimes like to play games in parallel so we can discuss them, but in this case I balked even at $30 when it was previously discounted. It was only when it got under $10 that I was willing to take the plunge, and even though I got it very cheap I couldn’t help but be almost offended by the original price.

In the olden days a studio that put out a game like Immortals of Aveum would probably get at least one or two more chances. The game would sell better, the publisher would be more understanding (though we are talking about EA) and the next game or the one after that would likely be much better and have a better chance of being a hit. Now the studio is not yet shuttered but is crippled, and a lot more studios have suffered similar fates for delivering one game that failed to meet expectations. It’s one thing when you put out a garbage fire like Gollum, but games like Immortals of Aveum have value. Just not enough value in the modern market. Games are too expensive to make and take too long, and the market is too competitive. There’s room for the great, sometimes room for the good, and almost no room for the average, at least without the support of a valuable IP of some sort.

But most games that new studios put out are going to be average. A lot of games are going to be average. It’s bad for the industry when average means not just that the product fails but that the studio fails too. If the average result is failure how many people are going to want to try?