Today, Marvel (under Disney) said that it is ending its relationship with Gazillion Entertainment, who publishes Marvel Heroes.
In an email, a Marvel representative wrote:
We regret to inform our Marvel Heroes fans that we have ended our relationship with Gazillion Entertainment, and that the Marvel Heroes games will be shut down. We would like to sincerely thank the players who joined the Marvel Heroes community, and will provide any further updates as they become available.
Released in 2013 for PC, Marvel Heroes is a sort of “Marvel Diablo” MMO. It’s a free-to-play game that sells playable characters such as Spider-Man, Squirrel Girl and Storm, as well as costumes for them. Earlier this year, the game ported to PS4 and Xbox One.
Marvel Heroes players knew the game’s developer might be in dire straits when, over the last month, the studio fell into radio silence. Developer Gazillion missed four of its weekly community updates, plus the game’s Halloween event and upcoming Thor: Ragnorak movie tie-in content, something the community expected. Fans also noticed when two community managers seemed to disappear from the forum. On October 27, the game was slated to release the Gladiator Thor pack.
One current and two former Gazillion employees confirmed to Kotaku that, within a year of the game’s launch, there were at least three rounds of layoffs. A current employee and a former employee told Kotaku that, this week, several individuals who work on the game were asked not to come into the office.
One current employee, who wished to remain anonymous, said that over the past two to three months he had been developing features for the game, but was “not very confident” that they would eventually get implemented. Of Marvel Heroes fans, he said, “While they’re sitting there reasonably flaming us, our hands are tied.”
Marvel Heroes‘ former creative director, Jeff Donais, told Kotaku that “[The lay-offs] would definitely not be the fault of the internal men and women who actually worked on the game itself or served the customers… It was a real thing that people didn’t see their families as much as they should, or sacrificed their health to work an 80-hour week when an important patch deadline was looming… The patch release schedule, especially when PC was the main focus, was aggressively insane.”
Comments
14 responses to “Disney Shuts Down Marvel Heroes”
I hope someone did a preservation job on it, as the game was pretty solid.
Its owned by disney. Its gone. Its not coming back.
Unless they can find a way to steal a bunch of stories and chop them into 1 ‘original’ and ‘new’ story then get loot crates into it.
I was meaning the more… ah…. community hosted reverse engineered servers.
But yes, your probably right.
All good things…
…are wrapped in bacon?
More than likely people can thank the ruckus surrounding the current CEO Dave Dohrmann for the decline into cancellation territory.
Especially given that Gazillion recently renewed the Marvel contract for PC.
Was never made available in the Xbox One store in Australia and they never gave a reason as to why.
This used to be the best Marvel game yet. I’d login almost daily to play. Then they changed the character movement for the impending console port which sucked a lot of the fun out of the game for me. Barely played it since then.
Still, it wasn’t a good way to go out with all the hubbub surrounding their new CEO.
(Edited a bazillion times because of the stupid moderation bs!)
Last edited November 16, 2017 9:21 am
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The video game industry has brought back Industrial Revolution era sweat shops and human suffering.
We are two years away from seeing child labour used at EA.
If you have ever pre ordered or bought a game on release at $80+ congratulations, youre the problem.
As someone that played from the Beta through to “The BIG update” this game was amazing right up until they started working on the console port and broke every aspect of the PC version.
Not only did i spend thousands of hour playing, i also spent a more than fair share of money on the game as it was great, but like most of the legacy players when they updated it for console, replaced certain community leaders and stopped listening to the community in order to make a few extra bucks they killed it.
The SHEER level of player base drop off after “The BIG update” was insane, check the steam reviews and forums around that time and you will see how upset and disappointed the players were.
That’s a shame.
I played this game on and off for a few weeks and genuinely enjoyed it =/
I still go back to it every now and then. Its a solid take on Diablo, and mixes the Marvel universe up as well as you could expect.
I think I’ll miss having it sitting there as an option.
Loved it before the BUE, but they really ruined it with that update. I didn’t necessarily want the game to fail after that, but I’m not surprised that it did. I remember the vast majority of the feedback for the BUE (particularly the movement changes) was negative, but they stuck to their guns and ran the game into the ground in the process. RIP.
tryed to play a few time lag really high impossible to play.
Phew. Glad I didn’t get too deep into it. It was a fun game, but didn’t have enough to keep me invested.
Makes me wonder what could have been if Marvel had stuck with Cryptic way back then…(Champions Online -> Marvel Universe Online?)