Marvel’s Avengers is very well-liked by MeinMMO author Jürgen Horn. However, the game is currently not thriving, and it’s not just because Jürgen likes it.
What is going on with Marvel’s Avengers? Looking at the player numbers on Steam, at times fewer than 1,000 players are playing simultaneously. That is far too few for a purely multiplayer game, and players often wait a long time for a match, which they may still have to fill with AI heroes. The usual suspects are to blame for the decline:
- The game is particularly full of bugs in the endgame
- There is a lack of content that should have come a long time ago
- The loot is also unsatisfactory – an absurdity for a game focused on loot hunting
Okay, and maybe it’s also because I really like the game. After all, many games I liked have already flopped. WildStar, Cloud Pirates, Elder Scrolls Legends, Battleborn, and Crucible – the list is long. But this time, there seems to be more to it.
First Anthem, then Marvel’s Avengers – Why do big AAA projects fail?
The current situation of Avengers is astonishingly reminiscent of the fate of Anthem. I also enjoyed playing that game back then, but shortly after launch, it ran out of steam. There was a lack of content, the loot was rubbish, and there were plenty of bugs. Anthem was a big AAA product from a reputable studio, not a cobbled-together indie game developed by some computer science students from a garage via crowdfunding.
One would expect that established companies like Crystal Dynamics and Square-Enix would turn the certainly exorbitantly expensive Marvel license into a solid game that meets AAA standards. Instead, a completely unfinished game was released, whose endgame feels strangely empty and dull compared to the excellent campaign and doesn’t even work properly.
That the developers hardly communicate for weeks and instead prefer to post funny Captain America fun facts on Twitter rather than address the problems speaks volumes about the state of the game and the situation within the dev team. The developers’ recent statement, in which they profess how hard they are working to make Avengers the game we all want, does little to reassure me.
Why do players have to be told, a month after launch, that a game is still so buggy that it cannot be called the game fans want? The current mess is certainly not what anyone wished for, that should be clear.
Why is this happening? I can’t say for sure why things went so poorly with Marvel’s Avengers, but according to an insider report, Anthem’s failure was primarily due to ineffective work and the need to finish too much all at once in too short a time. Therefore, there were shortcomings on all sides.
Marvel’s Avengers also appears shockingly unfinished in the endgame. It seems as if the developers didn’t finish in time and just threw the game on the market in a half-baked state. This was already obvious at many points in the beta, and more than a month after launch, the situation looks no better.
Why does this always happen to my favorite games?
Well, Anthem was nice, but it didn’t rock me so much that I would have been greatly upset about its fate. However, with Marvel’s Avengers, I am much angrier.
Because I really liked this game. The campaign was one of the most beautiful stories I’ve played in an MMO in a long time and the gameplay, which is drastically different for each hero, is simply a lot of fun.
You can really feel that the developers wanted to create more than just a cheap license conveyor for Avengers. But it also feels like they weren’t nearly finished at release and would have needed at least another year to make the game what it should be. Namely, a Destiny with Marvel heroes. Right now, it is more like a dreadful bug fest that hardly anyone wants to play, not even me.
And that really makes me angry. Time and again, games I like flop because either not enough players are interested or the developers fail to turn a great idea into anything sustainably successful due to poor planning, tight deadlines, or overconfidence.
But I haven’t lost hope yet. Even the flopped Anthem is said to be getting a remake, and the developers of Avengers have firmly promised to address the many problems of the game. I just hope this happens in time before no one cares about the Avengers’ adventures in the MMO anymore.
