Immortals of Aveum director blames poor sales on busy release calendar and says "no one anticipated" Baldur's Gate 3 to be so successful

When Immortals of Aveum, the EA Original FPS from Ascendant Studios, launched back in August, I wondered if it would be buried under the weight of higher-profile releases like Starfield, and apparently I was right to.

Ascendant CEO and Immortals of Aveum game director Bret Robbins told Windows Central that the extraordinarily busy release calendar this year made it hard for the studio's debut title to find an audience.

"We were not in a position where we could delay or push out of our launch window," Robbins said. "You set those windows quite a bit ahead of time because you're spending marketing dollars, you have commitments to a particular date."

Robbins added that "no one anticipated" Baldur's Gate 3 to become the phenomenon that it has, further complicating Immortals of Aveum's path to success. In fairness, Larian's Golden Joystick-winning RPG released just a few weeks before Immortals of Aveum and utterly dominated the conversation, crushing expectations and garnering universal acclaim from critics and players alike.

"I've never seen a year like this," he said. "It's always hard to break through the noise when you're a new IP or a studio people haven't heard of before. Trying to create awareness for us was really, really difficult. It's always hard for a new IP and this year made it 10 times harder."

It's worth pointing out that, while I very much enjoyed the game and think its refreshingly old-school approach to single-player shooters deserves more credit, our Immortals of Aveum review echoes many others in saying, essentially, it really ain't perfect.

The shooter's first big update, Echollector, recently added new endgame content, a bunch of performance improvements, some quality-of-life tweaks, a New Game Plus mode, and more.

Immortals of Aveum didn't quite make the cut for our list of the best FPS games of all time.