IGN gave Immortals of Aveum an 8/10. The studio laid off 45% of its staff 23 days later.
The Original Review
“Immortals of Aveum is an impressively confident first-person shooter with a hearty solo campaign and fast-paced, spellcasting combat that's spectacular to watch.”
Let's run the numbers. IGN's 8/10 for Immortals of Aveum places it in the upper quartile of their review scale — a score that statistically means 'this is good, spend the $70.' Luke Reilly called it 'an impressively confident first-person shooter with fast-paced, spellcasting combat that's spectacular to watch.' The game's peak concurrent player count on Steam at launch: 482. That number is not approximate. On release weekend, with EA marketing behind it and an IGN 8 leading the coverage cycle, the maximum number of simultaneous players globally was four hundred and eighty-two. That is not a playerbase. That is a Discord server.
For scale: IGN gave Skull and Bones a 6 — Ubisoft's eleven-year, $200 million, self-described 'AAAA' shipwreck — and gave Immortals of Aveum two full points higher. Their Cyberpunk 2077 score, published on a game that would be pulled from the PlayStation Store by Sony within days, was a 9. So the IGN scale reads, in descending order of disaster: 9 for Cyberpunk, 8 for Immortals of Aveum, 6 for Skull and Bones. This is a coherent scale in the same way that a thermometer calibrated inside a volcano is technically a thermometer.
The timeline is where the model breaks down. August 22, 2023: IGN publishes the 8/10, embargo day, same morning as launch. September 14, 2023: Ascendant Studios announces layoffs affecting 45% of its workforce, citing poor sales. That is a 23-day gap between 'impressively confident' and 'restructured for financial reasons.' The game subsequently sold on Steam at 90% off — $7, down from $70. The review continues to rank in search results above the layoff announcement.
An 8/10 is a quantitative claim: this product delivers value proportional to its price point. The data returned by the market — 482 concurrent players, 90% price collapse, 45% workforce reduction within the same pay period — is also quantitative. One of these data sets was published on embargo day. One arrived three weeks later. The math ain't mathing.
