"You can call ambition foolish, if you want." What went wrong with Immortals of Aveum

Plus: Lots of games announced for the Switch's 8th year.

Immortals of Aveum. Screenshot: Ascendant Studios

Bret Robbins is still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong.

Last August, Robbins and his start-up development team at Ascendant Studios launched a first-person game about being a magic-wielding soldier. And then they watched in horror as it flopped.

“I have been doing a lot of forensics and soul-searching about why we are where we are,” Robbins told me last week in Las Vegas. 

He’s doing some of that soul-searching in public, as he talked to reporters like me.

“You don't hear a lot of stories about what happens when not everything goes right,” he told me. “I think it's useful for people to hear about it.”