Marvel’s Avengers arrived with great fanfare earlier this year, promising to let gamers take control of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and live out their MCU dreams. Sadly, however, it didn’t work out like publisher Square Enix had hoped. Despite a moderately entertaining single player campaign starring Ms. Marvel, the meat of the game turned out to be an extremely repetitive online brawler in which you beat up boring robots for samey cosmetics.
It launched to mixed reviews and players paid attention, resulting in the title being largely responsible for Square posting an estimated loss of around $63M. Now, four months on from its release, there are only around a thousand people playing it any one time – a 96% drop – meaning it’s effectively on life support.
But the developer will be hoping that some incoming high profile DLC can help out. We recently got our first new hero in Kate Bishop and now it seems they’re gearing up for the next character, as the official site has just added a “coming soon” icon for an unknown individual, as you can see below.
https://twitter.com/PlayAvenger/status/1341458876709924865?s=20
The consensus seems to be that this’ll be Hawkeye/Clint Barton, who’ll wrap up the story of the Kate Bishop DLC. If true, this won’t exactly set the world on fire as we just got a bow and arrow hero in Kate, but rumor has it we’ll be getting Black Panther in early 2021, so that might spark some interest in the game. We also know Spider-Man will be arriving soon, though this is unlikely to kick off a second wave of popularity for Marvel’s Avengers as the web-slinger will be exclusive to Sony consoles.
Right now, it seems as if the title will go down as a cautionary tale for developers not to assume that players will buy something purely because of the license. Maybe the smart thing to do would be to ditch the disappointing post-game multiplayer mode and focus on single player episodes that are as good as the core campaign. Honestly, the Kate Bishop DLC was a decent (if short) first try, so maybe the future isn’t too gloomy.