Marvel’s Avengers is a Huge Disappointment for Square Enix

In the recently released Square Enix annual report, The higher-ups are once again voicing their concerns and problems with Marvel’s Avengers and its inability to perform positively from a financial standpoint.

Marvel’s Avengers saw its release in 2020 as an action-adventure game with both single-player and multiplayer components. As a live-service game, it is still seeing new updates and being worked upon by the original people who are responsible for developing the title, Crystal Dynamics. Being a game that’s reliant on an active schedule of pumping out new content so as to maintain its player base, it has fallen under scrutiny more than a few times from the people responsible for its inception for the resources that it took to develop.

In the 2021 Square Enix annual report, the current President and Representative Director of the company Yosuke Matsuda state the game to be an overly ambitious undertaking on their part. In the paper, Yosuke points at Marvel’s Avengers as being a failed venture in terms of meeting expectations set out by the company when they endeavored to make the game a reality.

This is despite the fact of choosing to make a game that fits under the rubric of Games as a Service (GaaS), whilst surpassing the obstacles that they have faced during the game’s development. He seemingly attributes such failings to be the result of having allocated the wrong monetization model to a game of Marvel’s Avengers’ genre, and not one that was compatible with the capabilities and interests of the company’s development teams. Though he concludes by stating that he is still optimistic as to the future of the live service model, and its likelihood of becoming an important service model in the future video gaming landscape.

It is possible to glimpse into the reasons as to why Marvel’s Avengers’ considered a disappointment from looking at the Square Enix Financial Briefings made in 2020, where it was stated that the initial release of the game has proven incapable of offsetting the large development cost that has been invested into the game, therefore making it a necessity for the game to earn back such cost by producing more sales through the release of new content. Such attempts clearly have not proven to be successful enough for Square Enix to come to a different conclusion, as indicated by the recent remarks made by the President of the company.

As for the game’s part, the Devs clearly still show intentions to keep the live service running, as they have announced a roadmap for Marvel’s Avengers back in September, with the plans of introducing their first-ever Raid content and a Playstation Spider-Man Event to come. The game also sees regular bug fixes and patches, as games of the monetization model would be expected to.

Just a day ago, the game’s made an official announcement to remove experience boosters from the in-game marketplace, as a result of the ire it’s drawing from its player base for walking back on the previous promise of keeping microtransactions cosmetics only. It is difficult to assume where the future of Marvel’s Avengers will lie following the conclusion of its current content roadmap. But recent events would indicate it to be besieged on all sides, by both company executives and the players who have bought into the game. And that doesn’t paint a positive outlook.

Marvel’s Avengers is available now on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, Xbox One Xbox Series X/S, and PC.