Agents of Mayhem
Agents of Mayhem launched on August 15 last year, and it all but tanked. It’s tough to say who this game was for. Even the developers weren’t sure. In October, Jim Boone, one of the game’s leads, said this:
“The fact that it is a new IP, in this day and age, means it can be hard to get the right kind of attention. At the same time we had just enough of that Saints Row trimming around it, that I can see how consumers might have looked at it and gone: ‘Oh, it’s a new Saints Row game. Oh no, it isn’t. Is it? I’m not quite sure.’ I don’t know if that contributed to it or not, but it is interesting to think about why it didn’t strike the right chord. I sometimes wonder if the material just didn’t capture people’s fancy in the right way… was the tone just not right? It is a really weak answer, but I have the same question that you do, and I am anxious to dig into it with the team, who have spent a lot more time than I have so far on it.”
And if sales numbers are any indication, he was right: players were over Saints Row and anything set in that world. In its first week, it failed to sell more than 70,000 copies on consoles (for reference, Saints Row 4 sold one million copies in its first week), which for virtually any AAA game, is a clear indication of impending doom — sure, it has likely sold more since then, but even if that number doubled, 140,000 could still be perceived as disappointing for a studio as large as Volition. That doom became a reality when a little over a month after the game launched, the studio behind Agents of Mayhem, Volition, was hit with a massive wave of layoffs that saw over 30 people (of the 200-person company) let go. Today, the game is still live, but in the last 24 hours, the peak amount of players on Steam reached only 216 — the peak overall for Agents of Mayhem is 3,665.
