Forget Spider-Man 2, Marvel’s most ambitious superhero game just died

pcgamesn.com:

Marvel’s Avengers is dead. The live service take on Earth’s Mightiest Heroes has officially been completely delisted from all digital storefronts as of Saturday, September 30, and it takes with it a promising game that fell victim to chasing industry trends. While anyone who already owns the game can still play both the single-player and multiplayer, no word of mouth can expand the audience. This is it.

I always liked Marvel’s Avengers. I didn’t love the hamfisted attempts at superhero loot boxes, recurring menial events, and all the live service gumbo that bloated the experience, but under that there was a solid single-player game, and a diverse cast of playable characters that could have made a truly great superhero co-op adventure on top of that.

Earlier this year we learned that Marvel’s Avengers was shutting down, as no new content for the Square Enix published and Crystal Dynamics developed live service game was coming, followed by this week’s pulling from digital storefronts. With dwindling player numbers, I can only assume that the live service game did not meet the regular audience it required to successfully carve out a place in the genre’s ever-so-small space. After all, a cursory glance at somewhere like Steam will show how few were playing.

A Marvel’s Avengers sale did offer up last-minute adopters a cheap way to try the game alone or with friends, but the gamble of using the world’s biggest superhero team to cut through the overpopulated games as a service space didn’t work. Not even using one of the world’s biggest properties means your live service game will be a success, and there should really be a lesson in that.

It’s also pretty upsetting that Marvel’s Avengers just had its highest player count in