Developers of Immortals of Aveum, Ascendant Studios have reportedly furloughed a large percentage of its employees. The news became public through a LinkedIn post a couple of days back when Principal Engineer at Phoenix Labs, Kris Morness, who had formerly also held the same position at Ascendant.
2023 was a year dominated by an unfortunate number of layoff news from several gaming studios that lasted all year and the trend continued earlier this year as well. While being laid off was bad enough, getting furloughed is worse, though Morness did speculate there were not many left in the studio in the first place.
Immortals of Aveum Developer Furloughs Employees Months After a Massive Layoff
Ascendant Studios’ Immortals of Aveum (IOA) was released for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S consoles late last year on the 22nd of August 2023. Just a month later, Founder and CEO, Bret Robbins announced the departure of 45% of the workforce who got laid off. Robbins wished them the best, as the first-person shooter continued to get mixed reviews.
Earlier this year, in February, Robbins sat down for an interview with the Games Industry where he spoke in length about IOA. Despite the mixed reviews, fans stayed positive about the upcoming updates to the game. In a surprising move, the studio has reportedly furloughed several of its staff this time around, first revealed by Kris Morness who posted the news on LinkedIn.
He also stated that the title was just “chapter one” for the studio and that Ascendant will “keep having more chapters.” For this reason and all the expectations, the furlough comes as a massive surprise.
Being furloughed would mean the affected employees will remain employed, but what’s worse is they will now have highly reduced or no work and they will also not be eligible for severance pay, with just their benefits intact.
Fans Left Wondering About Future Updates to Immortals
Earlier this month, an update posted on Steam stated the studio was “hard at work on our next project” while also working on improving the overall experience of the game. HDR and AMD FS3 support was announced to be coming to PC editions of IOA after the consoles get the features first. Fans were still looking forward to these upgrades and more but now it’s unknown as to whether they’ll ever see the light of the day.
Fans hoped the studio would lay off the affected employees rather than keep them tied to the studio without pay. One of the fans mentioned on X, how they were looking forward to all the updates coming to Immortals of Aveum which opened to a lukewarm reception but was still being played by a handful of players.
That's very sad to hear, the game had an extremely rough launch but I was still looking forward to their HDR and UE 5.2 upgrades.
— Pyke_64 (@Pyke_64) April 12, 2024
Updates were also expected on the PC edition following Unreal Engine’s 5.2 update.
Fans on Reddit also mostly had a lot of positive things to say about Immortals of Aveum, as some of them blamed the timing of Immortals of Aveum‘s release which was around the time several other AAA titles were also released.
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byu/Turbostrider27 from discussion
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Most others hoped the affected employees eventually get laid off at the earliest so they could get a severance, rather than just a glowing recommendation.
What are your thoughts about employees being furloughed rather than getting laid off? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
