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Square Enix has admitted Marvel's Avengers was a disappointment, but it's committed to learning from its mistakes and making a live service model work in the future.
It has now been well over a year since the launch of Marvel's Avengers and the teams that continue to work on it still haven't managed to turn the ship around. What should have been a huge deal for Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics has to be considered a failure at this point. Applying the live service model simply hasn't worked, something even Square has now reluctantly admitted.
Avengers was obviously a much-talked-about topic in the studio's annual report, in which the Marvel game was described as a disappointment. “We were able to surmount these challenges and release the game, but it has unfortunately not proven as successful as we would have liked,” the report reads. The challenges mentioned include having to transition to working from home during the final stages of Avengers' development.
Despite failing to turn Avengers into the roaring success that it really should have been, the report goes on to say Square will not be giving up on the games as a service model. “How we go about creating new experiences by incorporating this trend into our game design is a key question that we will need to answer going forward.” It also mentions meshing game designs with the right studio, which feels a little like an admission that Crystal Dynamics might not have been the right developer for the job.
Perhaps most interesting of all is the complete lack of any information pertaining to Avengers' future. While the report mentions live service games multiple times, it doesn't specifically highlight how that pertains to what's next for Avengers. If anything, the report suggests that Square may well be preparing to throw in the towel and try games as a service again via a different project with a different developer taking the lead.
The only announced milestone left for Avengers is the addition of Spider-Man, who will only be coming to the PS4 and PS5 versions of the game due to Sony's ownership of the character. In other Avengers news, Square announced this week that it will be removing pay-to-win mechanics from the game that were added last month. The backlash following the announcement was fierce since many working on the game had promised it would never be pay-to-win.