Good afternoon, Gamers, I’m Davey and I’m bringing you the latest news regarding Marvel’s Avengers game, and I’m going to try to explain this one very clearly.
What is Marvel’s Avengers?
Marvel’s Avengers is the long-awaited game where you can play with or without your friends as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes with a plethora of characters to play. The game officially launched on Google Stadia (seriously, who uses Stadia nowadays?), Microsoft Windows, Microsoft’s Xbox One consoles and Sony’s Playstation 4, and by all that is holy dear readers, it did not have a good launch. Within days of the beta releasing, people had issues with the multiplayer aspects of the game, and how much frame rate was lost when your characters combined to perform some forms of super-move. The Metacritic user score of 3.2/10 speaks for itself on that.
There was more controversy to come upon launch day though, as it turned out that this game, which had cost gamers in the UK £49.99, was replete and filled to the brim with microtransactions of the worst variety, and to make matters worse, one of the most popular superheroes of the franchise was a console exclusive.
How This has affected things.
Well, for a start, multiple media sites and companies gave this game extremely bad reviews. WhatCulture, which have a great gaming branch of their YouTube channel, gave this game an extremely negative review, and to be fair to you, I don’t disagree. Unfortunately for this well endowed writer, I’d pre-ordered the game on Microsoft Store, and the game came out horrendously. Poor and repetitive level cycles and design, the grind was similar to that of Star Wars Battlefront 2, and in the words of our very own Grahame Singleton, whilst the game is an enjoyable one to play, “the bugs kill the game”.
Naturally, with very poor reviews from gamers and gaming magazines alike (but weirdly not the entertainment magazines), this game hasn’t made a huge amount of sales for Square Enix and Disney, but how bad could it be? Well…
According to PC Gamer (thanks guys, we love you), Square Enix have reportedly lost a grand total of $48 million dollars on this game so far, and whilst with the introduction of patches to fix glitches and bugs in the game will improve those sales (as we saw what happened with Batman: Arkham Knight), here at Gamerhub, we don’t hold out that much hope. It gets worse: In terms of physical copies, Square Enix have reported to PC Gamer that they’ve only shipped a grand total of 3 million copies so far, with the majority of their sales being digital.
Games Analyst David Gibson took a potshot at this particular newsworthy event on Twitter (@gibbogame), stating that the implications were that the game cost over $100 million to make, and in Mr Gibson’s own words here, “ouch”. He then expanded, commenting on the additional costs of marketing the game and extra expenditure, reckoning that in total, the game cost somewhere between $170 million and $190 million. However, in Gibson’s words, Square Enix are adamant that they can make a comeback.
Our Opinions
The writing was on the wall from the beta release, as it appeared that every issue gamers reported after playing the beta was simply ignored by Square Enix, and by extension, the House Of Mouse itself. In this writer’s opinion, it’s symptomatic of a larger issue that Disney has with the attitudes of fans of all the things that they’ve bought over the last decade, but that’s for a different article. However, the fact that so many issues would have been solved had they simply delayed the launch to fix these bugs and glitches could have made this game a financial success, even though they didn’t get the MCU actors in to voice the characters.
So, that’s you all caught up, and for Gamerhub, I’ve been Davey.
