Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, Richard Garriott's spiritual successor to the legendary online role-playing game Ultima Online - and for a long time the second-most-crowdfunded game around (with more than $10m raised) - launched a only a few months ago, 27th March 2018. Did you notice? I don't blame you, because it appears to have been a flop.

Steam doesn't paint the whole picture, because you can buy and play the game through the official Shroud of the Avatar website, but the picture it does paint is worrying. In the launch month of March, Shroud of the Avatar had a peak Steam concurrent player count of only 562, which is tiny - way outside of the top-100 let alone the top-10. And customer reviews average at 'Mixed', which means you see plenty of off-putting negative reviews.

But more worrying was news of layoffs. A reporter from MMORPG visited Shroud developer Portalarium a couple of weeks ago, coincidentally a day after the layoffs happened, and said "half their team" had been let go.

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Shroud of the Avatar, the Ultima spiritual successor from Richard Garriott's studio Portalarium, comes out on 27th March 2018 on PC, Mac and Linux via Steam.

There's a free trial available now from the Shroud of the Avatar website.

Shroud of the Avatar raised an impressive $1.9m from over 22,000 backers via Kickstarter back in 2013. It was a pitch that traded heavily on the nostalgia for Ultima, specifically Ultimate Online. The game then launched on Steam Early Access in November 2014.

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