www.thegamer.com It’s Official: Marvel’s Avengers Is Gone Rhiannon Bevan
After just three years, Marvel’s Avengers has been delisted. Anyone who owns it can still play, but it’s a grim end for the live service. Multiple heroes from Marvel’s Avengers
It’s happened, Marvel’s Avengers is no more. Just three years after launch, the game has been delisted from all storefronts but will remain playable for anyone who picked it up before the takedown. You should still be able to play with friends, but any issues you run into won’t be addressed, and there will be no more events.
This makes for a pretty short lifespan, particularly for a live service with much grander aspirations. It’s also a far more dramatic move than most publishers would make, as many would just stop providing updates for the game. Instead, Crystal Dynamics owner Embracer Group has gone as far as preventing any new players from picking up the game, even though both single-player and multiplayer elements are perfectly playable.
Marvel’s Avengers at least ended on a slightly better note than it opened on, as the price was cut by 90 percent. This netted you the Definitive Edition, which includes all of the cosmetics and DLC for free. In practice, this should help Marvel’s Avengers feel like any other single-player game, rather than a live service that just had its roadmap come to an end.
Alas, the Steam reviews were still “mixed” by the time Embracer pulled the plug, so its chance for a comeback seems to have come and gone. Admittedly, there’s a reason support didn’t last long, as it struggled to find its audience in a sea of other live services. Met with mixed reviews from launch too, its audience quickly grew frustrated with its online elements, including controversial paid XP boosters around a year after launch. In terms of sales, it performed below expectations but continued to receive updates and expansions regardless.
Through it all, it retained a dedicated, if often frustrated, audience. They were never afraid to make their grievances known, but they would stick with the live service through thick and thin. However, it seems that this just wasn’t enough to please Embracer Group when it acquired Crystal Dynamics in 2022.
We’ll have to see how the future fares for Marvel’s Avengers, now that it’s been delisted. The generous 90 percent off sale is likely to have enticed a few would-be players who were on the fence throughout the game’s online run, so who knows? Maybe it will pick up a cult following through its offline offerings. Yet this probably won’t be enough to secure the sequel that some fans were after, especially with Embracer Group tightening its purse strings in recent weeks. In practice, this has led to numerous layoffs across many of the studios it owns, so hardly a time that Embracer bosses would want to take a risk on a series that’s already failed once. "