Marvel’s Avengers, the always-online multiplayer RPG action adventure multihyphenate, has been pulled from digital storefronts around the internet after only three years in release.
Avengers, a game that cost Square Enix a reported $US170 million to develop, was neither a commercial nor critical hit. Right from the start, people were unimpressed with the character designs that Crystal Dynamics had gone with (or rather, that Disney had approved). It deployed a bizarre mish-mash of single-player action-adventure design tropes with the endless multiplayer RPG loot grind of a game like Destiny or Diablo. It was this second component that really did the game in — even the world’s most famous superheroes couldn’t keep players interested, or the game afloat.
And so, after just three years, CD’s new owner, Embracer, announced it would be turning the lights off. Over the weekend, it did exactly that. Just days after fresh wave of games industry redundancies, Embracer pulled the game from sale. Most publishers would simply announce that the game was going end-of-life and that no future updates would be forthcoming. But not Embracer, it seems. The very expensive work of thousands of people, gone without a trace after just three years.
For Embracer, this is nothing more than cutting its losses — the culling of an expensive game from its portfolio after going on a spree of acquisitions. A reminder at this juncture that it took a reported five years to make Marvel’s Avengers in the first place, and another three to support it with new content for the players that were showing up. Eight years of work, up in smoke.
If you’ve already purchased a digital copy of Marvel’s Avengers previously, the game will remain in your library. The only way to purchase the game now is via a physical (likely preowned) copy at your nearest retailer — and if it doesn’t come with any of the DLC, you now won’t be able to buy that separately. After that, it’s only a matter of time before the servers go dark as well.
The games industry’s “profit at any cost” mentality cannot be sustained.
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