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Marvel Heroes to be closed down

championshewolfchampionshewolf Posts: 4,375 Arc User
edited November 2017 in Off Topic
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“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.”
Official shut down date is the 19th of December, 2017.
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  • ealford1985ealford1985 Posts: 3,582 Arc User
    Another one bites the dust.
  • flyingfinnflyingfinn Posts: 8,408 Arc User
    edited November 2017




    Post edited by flyingfinn on
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  • championshewolfchampionshewolf Posts: 4,375 Arc User
    Honestly my view of it; It's not a good thing, less competition out there tends to make companies complacent and refuse to innovate if they don't have something to compete against. And this isn't a good sign for super hero MMOs in general.
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  • on the flip side...it means a few more players for CO, which is always a positive​​
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  • ealford1985ealford1985 Posts: 3,582 Arc User
    CO was never trying to compete with Marvel Heroes....or really anyone.

    We just roll along
  • championshewolfchampionshewolf Posts: 4,375 Arc User

    on the flip side...it means a few more players for CO, which is always a positive​​

    We said that about CoH, and the bitterness they felt regardless of reality kept many from here or just spending their time trolling or whining about it. So I don't foresee much impact on CO as a whole.
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  • screwthisprocessscrewthisprocess Posts: 186 Arc User

    Honestly my view of it; It's not a good thing, less competition out there tends to make companies complacent and refuse to innovate if they don't have something to compete against. And this isn't a good sign for super hero MMOs in general.

    I don't think CO was going to innovate anyway tbh. About Marvel game, it had an MOBA business model, but it was an MMO ARPG :/ Really, how long did they think that will last? No customization doomed the game imo. They had nothing to sell but skins and heroes nobody cares about. People want to play Hulk not Vison
  • servantrulesservantrules Posts: 312 Arc User
    Not really surprised. I don't foresee much movement from that player base to CO or DCUO, though there would likely be some. Marvel Heroes didn't really go anywhere, creatively. Hell, if Avengers Alliance had a better direction and larger following and it got canned for being flash-based, this development is par for the course.
  • revanantmoriturirevanantmorituri Posts: 391 Arc User
    It isn't as if we had a marketing budget to try to draw in former Marvel players. Cryptic dropped the ball royally when Paragon was shut down, and thousands of despondent CoH players were cut loose into the wild. No reason to think they will try to take advantage of this particular occurrence.
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  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    edited November 2017

    Honestly my view of it; It's not a good thing, less competition out there tends to make companies complacent and refuse to innovate if they don't have something to compete against. And this isn't a good sign for super hero MMOs in general.

    That isn't much of an issue with CO. It also isn't much of an issue with the other superhero MMOs that are in development because they're all hardlining CoX influence regardless of what happens to tangenial MMOs or other multiplayer games. We still have to wait and see what an actual, experienced game company will possibly decide to do with the Superhero MMO concept. Which, I mean, that is pretty specific...

    From what little I know about Marvel Heroes' gameplay, it was possibly the least 'innovative' of the superhero MMOs, and has entirely different selling points than games like CO or DCUO - it's a Diablo-styled overhead MMO where players don't design their own costume, but instead pick from established Marvel characters that everyone loves. It's basically Diablo or MOBA gameplay; no real Y-axis, not much to do with environmentals. Aside from being a very well established IP, it's pretty conventional in all standards.

    If anything, people from that game are probably going to be real disappointed when they find out they can't play their favorite Marvel characters here legally. That or they're going to usher in Cryptic V Marvel (aka DISNEY) round 2 in the courts which... probably could not go well. I find that unlikely, because this game is marketed(?) to draw in a different crowd altogether nowadays.


    All things considered I really have to wonder what prompted that decision. I can't help but think it's something tangenially related to flak over Star Wars Battlefront 2. Though at that point it's just mad conspiracy theory.
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  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    bluhman said:

    We still have to wait and see what an actual, experienced game company will possibly decide to do with the Superhero MMO concept.

    Given the current state of MMOs in the west, I wouldn't hold my breath (PvE Overwatch seems closest to plausible). Unless mobile phone MMOs explode.
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    Can you please not use the words "mobile phone" and "explode" in the same sentence? o3o
  • championshewolfchampionshewolf Posts: 4,375 Arc User
    edited November 2017

    It isn't as if we had a marketing budget to try to draw in former Marvel players. Cryptic dropped the ball royally when Paragon was shut down, and thousands of despondent CoH players were cut loose into the wild. No reason to think they will try to take advantage of this particular occurrence.

    There was no dropping the ball over CoH. I am sorry CoH players are still bitter, but no amount of coaxing was going to get the majority of CoH players to come to CO. None. Most CoH players had already made up their minds that, no matter what, CO was not as good or realistically, better than CoH, because they had stayed in their echo chamber long enough to have created a bunch of myths about CO and of course why COH closed down. Considering how often CoH players would review bomb any article about Co on any website, that still continues to this day, and you expect Cryptic would have been able to coax any of them to try the game?

    In short, CoH players created an echo chamber, many of them creating a fantasy environment of circumstances that led to their games closure (personal favs are Cryptic forced CoH to close, NCSoft just hates money and Americans and closed it out of spite and even a whopper that CoH was the most popular MMO, despite failing hard in Asia and barely having a European presence let alone American one), and a hate train of bile and misinformation concerning Champions and Jack Emmert in particular. This was never going to change, no matter if Cryptic gave every CoH player that came over a free life time sub to the game.
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  • jennymachxjennymachx Posts: 3,000 Arc User
    *Throws a Note 7 at Spinny*

    With the backing of the MCU doing a great deal of the marketing for Marvel Heroes...this comes off as a huge surprise for me.

  • championshewolfchampionshewolf Posts: 4,375 Arc User

    *Throws a Note 7 at Spinny*

    With the backing of the MCU doing a great deal of the marketing for Marvel Heroes...this comes off as a huge surprise for me.

    Doesn't for me since it was floundering. The console run was the last move and it did poorly, which meant all the coding time cost lots of money that won't be recouped.
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  • jonesing4jonesing4 Posts: 800 Arc User
    > @championshewolf said:
    >
    > There was no dropping the ball over CoH. I am sorry CoH players are still bitter, but no amount of coaxing was going to get the majority of CoH players to come to CO. None. Most CoH players had already made up their minds that, no matter what, CO was not as good or realistically, better than CoH, because they had stayed in their echo chamber long enough to have created a bunch of myths about CO and of course why COH closed down. Considering how often CoH players would review bomb any article about Co on any website, that still continues to this day, and you expect Cryptic would have been able to coax any of them to try the game?
    >

    Agreed. I especially don’t see how the burden would fall on “marketing”, since I can’t think there were many serious CoX players who weren’t aware of CO. The ones who still wanted to play superheroes came over here; the ones in fantasy land are still ghosts until the successor goes to Beta in 2045.
  • draogndraogn Posts: 1,269 Arc User
    Hopefully one of the projects SquareEnix is working on will result some competition. It's unlikely we'll hear much about them though for a while.
  • jonsillsjonsills Posts: 6,315 Arc User
    edited November 2017

    *Throws a Note 7 at Spinny*

    With the backing of the MCU doing a great deal of the marketing for Marvel Heroes...this comes off as a huge surprise for me.

    Not here, really. Successful movies don't mean successful games, especially MMOs. I mean, when was the last time you played The Fast and the Furious Online? Or, more realistically, The Matrix Online?
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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Posts: 4,915 Arc User
    I still remember when Avengers Alliance died. :/ I think Disney just doesn't know what to do with online games. They seem to want to limit things too much for the games to really be fun. I mean really, when have they ever let you create your own hero?
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  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
  • riveroceanriverocean Posts: 1,690 Arc User
    edited November 2017
    It's sad to see another supers multiplayer game close down. But there's a lot of factors at work these days.

    For example, mobile games are becomingly increasingly popular. Heck, I'm hooked on Mages & Minions now and Torchlight II is starting to look good on Android. RPG-Style gaming is something that is now portable and developers are even taking old PC games and porting them over to mobile. And since Marvel Omega was a Diablo style game -- it might end up as a mobile port some day. Gaming is changing...
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  • nephtnepht Posts: 6,883 Arc User
    edited November 2017



    “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.”

    Official shut down date is the 19th of December, 2017.




    That actually makes me sad Marvel Heroes was legit more Diablo than Diablo 3. What makes this worse is the Ps4 only got this game a few months ago. MvC:I being dead in the water and the new Spiderman game looking generic as f*&^ Marvel Heroes was the only decent Marvel game around.

    As a Marvel fangirl this makes me sad. Guess I'll be sticking to the DC games for my console superhero fixes.



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  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    Marvel Heroes sucked and deserved to be closed down o3o
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User

    For example, mobile games are becomingly increasingly popular. Heck, I'm hooked on Mages & Minions now and Torchlight II is starting to look good on Android. RPG-Style gaming is something that is now portable and developers are even taking old PC games and porting them over to mobile. And since Marvel Omega was a Diablo style game -- it might end up as a mobile port some day. Gaming is changing...

    I dunno all those "joystick circle on the left, power buttons on the right" games feel terrible to play for me. They generally have shallow gameplay, unsatisfying progression, and tend to dead end after the first hour. I'm sure there are some good ones, but the popularity means they're buried under a mountain of ****. The mobile gaming market needs to crash, hard. It got too big for its own good in like 1/100th the time it took the console/pc market to do that.
  • nephtnepht Posts: 6,883 Arc User
    spinnytop said:

    Marvel Heroes sucked and deserved to be closed down o3o


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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Posts: 4,915 Arc User
    jonsills said:

    *Throws a Note 7 at Spinny*

    With the backing of the MCU doing a great deal of the marketing for Marvel Heroes...this comes off as a huge surprise for me.

    Not here, really. Successful movies don't mean successful games, especially MMOs. I mean, when was the last time you played The Fast and the Furious Online? Or, more realistically, The Matrix Online?
    I heard that game basically continued the story of the movies after Neo's "death". Also, apparently it had more story in it than the movies did.
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  • chaosdrgnz43chaosdrgnz43 Posts: 1,674 Arc User
    Marvel is losing their edge lately. I hope they don't get bankrupt. To be honest, Marvel Heroes was a boring Diablo-esque Superhero MMORPG.

    At least here in CO you can virtually be anything you want.
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  • biffsmackwellbiffsmackwell Posts: 4,739 Arc User

    Marvel is losing their edge lately. I hope they don't get bankrupt. To be honest, Marvel Heroes was a boring Diablo-esque Superhero MMORPG.

    At least here in CO you can virtually be anything you want.

    Not everyone wants to create their own heroes. Champions itself is proof of that. You see the clones every day.

    And even though I love creating my own characters, it was super fun swinging around as Spider-Man, stomping around as Hulk and Juggernaut and such on Marvel Heroes. I've always liked Diablo-style games and didn't find Marvel boring at all.
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  • jennymachxjennymachx Posts: 3,000 Arc User
    edited November 2017
    jonsills said:

    Not here, really. Successful movies don't mean successful games, especially MMOs. I mean, when was the last time you played The Fast and the Furious Online? Or, more realistically, The Matrix Online?

    Lord of the Rings Online is still going strong despite being F2P and being based not only on the books but one of the most successful movie trilogies of all time. Heck, when the game went F2P a well known promotional ad featured a pun of a well-known line from the Fellowship of the Ring movie. Even the delivery of the line was in the exact manner.

    The strength of the IP the MMO is based on can have a huge factor on its longevitiy and mass appeal. Disney Marvel is like the monster franchise right now, so I'm still pretty surprised that this happened. It's far from being a terrible game too IMHO. My guess is that Disney isn't interested in any game that aren't potential triple-A "blockbusters" like Battlefront 2 is.
  • kallethenkallethen Posts: 1,576 Arc User
    jennymachx wrote: »
    The strength of the IP the MMO is based on can have a huge factor on its longevitiy and mass appeal. Disney Marvel is like the monster franchise right now, so I'm still pretty surprised that this happened. It's far from being a terrible game too IMHO. My guess is that Disney isn't interested in any game that aren't potential triple-A "blockbusters" like Battlefront 2 is.

    It's probably especially surprising that Disney pulled the plug since the game just released on console. I'm sure that's leaving a number of people pissed off. But I think you are spot on with your guess as to why Disney did it. I mean, look at Star Wars. As soon as Disney bought the Star Wars franchise, they killed off games (RIP Star Wars 1313) so as to give an exclusive licence to EA.


    (Though I wonder if that deal with EA is looking so hot now...)​​
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  • revanantmoriturirevanantmorituri Posts: 391 Arc User

    The strength of the IP the MMO is based on can have a huge factor on its longevitiy and mass appeal. Disney Marvel is like the monster franchise right now, so I'm still pretty surprised that this happened. It's far from being a terrible game too IMHO. My guess is that Disney isn't interested in any game that aren't potential triple-A "blockbusters" like Battlefront 2 is.

    Disney likes its "Family Friendly" image, a lot. A MMO's ESRB dialog "We cannot be held accountable for in game experience with other players" probably is not the direction they want to head in. So Marvel Online is sunsetted, LEGO Avengers 2 will be more in line with the company vision.
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  • championshewolfchampionshewolf Posts: 4,375 Arc User
    The speculation in this thread is amusing but it boils down to one thing; money. If the products were making money that would be one thing, but since Gazillion has been axing positions, that's pretty significant statement that Marvel heroes console release didn't do too hot and it had been waning in it's "MMO space" for a while now. Many did not like the recent changes to Marvel Heroes.

    Most aren't even shocked this is happening, in fact. It's sort of the same scenario as with City of Heroes, people just can't accept that the game wasn't doing as well as people thought or were lied to by developers. If it's making money, they aren't just going to end it.
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  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User

    Lord of the Rings Online is still going strong

    A fantasy genre mmo doing well? Color me shocked o3o
  • championshewolfchampionshewolf Posts: 4,375 Arc User
    Well, this happened even faster; Gazillion has laid off its workers and closed its doors and Marvel Heroes will be shut down on Friday, instead of in December;

    Gazillion Lays off Everyone on Thanksgiving Eve
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  • chaosdrgnz43chaosdrgnz43 Posts: 1,674 Arc User

    Well, this happened even faster; Gazillion has laid off its workers and closed its doors and Marvel Heroes will be shut down on Friday, instead of in December;

    Gazillion Lays off Everyone on Thanksgiving Eve

    Ouch, so much for "Happy Thanksgiving"...
    This Gazillion has pretty bad timing.
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  • championshewolfchampionshewolf Posts: 4,375 Arc User
    edited November 2017
    Digging deeper looks like a possible reason Disney pulled the contract, the CEO of Gazillion, David von Dohrmann, apparently has sexual misconduct and harassment claims against him (pedophilia rumors to), and apparently sounds like it is one of the reasons David Brevik left the company even. His wife (Brevik's), apparently, was very vocal about it when they were on a live stream after he left.

    This coupled with financial woes that seem to permeate the air, and the fact that Gazillion just shut things down without bothering to hold obligation to the December 31st deadline sounds like a lot of stink in the air, and a lot of issues with in Gazillion itself.

    [edit]

    Oh turns out that Dohrmann also humiliated and bullied employees in live streams as well, and I was wrong about the shutter date. It was originally set for December 31st.
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  • championshewolfchampionshewolf Posts: 4,375 Arc User
    edited November 2017
    Hrmm, even more fascinating information. Apparently the PC version of Marvel Heroes contract had actually expired. They were apparently 3 days from informing that they were going to start shutting the PC version of Marvel Heroes down when it got renewed (this was during the console launch of Marvel Heroes). Apparently they had given up on the PC version before it got renewed to. So a lot of mismanagement.





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  • flyingfinnflyingfinn Posts: 8,408 Arc User
    Life Lesson#345: Never spend money on something that might upset you later.
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