After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
There was another big release, too. I can’t remember what. Final Fantasy?
Competing with established titles requires a lot if marketing.
This game (Immortals of Aveum) already had a lot of controversy when they announced the PC minimum requirements, including an RTX 2080. People knew something wasn’t right there (optimization seemed poor, game was made with “upscaling in mind” - aka “we didn’t do anything to optimize this other than adding FSR2/DLSS, good luck”). Releases and it’s worse than expected with mediocre graphical features and horrible performance, generic cookie cutter garbage.
