Marvel’s Avengers was one of the most highly-anticipated games heading into 2020, despite some criticism of the character models in early gameplay reveals, but the game has had a rocky launch. After being delayed from a early summer release and pushed back to September, the single and multiplayer action looter arrived jam-packed with bugs and almost immediately had to start rescheduling the story and character DLC plans it had originally laid out for the remaining months of 2020.
As the game’s devs work hard to push out frequent patches that address the game’s campaign and multiplayer bugs, the title appears to be experiencing a shrinking playerbase that leads to matchmaking issues on select platforms. Early reviews and general fan reception seemed to react positively to the game’s feature length campaign and story mode (even despite the bugs), but it’s clear that Marvel’s Avengers was always meant to be a game that Square and Crystal Dynamics want to see players returning to daily for the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately at this point, there just isn’t quite enough endgame motivation or grind variety to keep existing players engaged and hook new ones in. But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost for Marvel’s Avengers.
Recent blog posts and War Table updates from the dev team have focused a lot on the prioritization of work on the game. The primary goal of the team right now is to make sure that the foundation of the game is as solid as possible before a lot of additional content starts to get dropped on top of it. This means getting rid of game-breaking bugs, optimizing matchmaking, and ensuring that the game as it exists now offers an experience that isn’t plagued by technical issues or balance problems. Because of that, the team has been hesitant to commit to dates for upcoming new characters, like Kate Bishop, or even general time frames for future characters like Clint, Blank Panther, and Spider-Man (for Sony players).
Loads of players on the game’s subreddit have already started to worry and speculate about whether the promised DLC characters and their missions will ever arrive. The hope when the game launched was that players would likely have a new character and DLC mission on a monthly basis. Now players are heading into the third month of the title and still waiting on the first character addition. Not only is that a problem for player engagement and daily logins, but it has got to also be hitting the game in the wallet, as well.
Although Marvel’s Avengers is a full price title that topped some sales charts in September, it seems like the real financial strategy for the project has always been microtransations and character Challenge Cards that would ideally be a huge part of that revenue stream. Sure, there is money to be made in the current Marketplace off of skins and emotes, but hero Challenge Cards are likely going to have more of a mass appeal and those can’t be sold until some new characters drop (the Challenge Cards for the six launch characters were given away for free as a reward to current players).
Marvel’s Avengers has a serious challenge ahead of itself to clean up the game’s bugs, make quality of life improvements, and get some new content into the rotation as soon as possible. That said, the game isn’t dead yet. It often takes a few months or even up to a year for this sort of “game as service” title to find solid footing and it makes sense that the project is still experiencing a lot of growing pains. The most important thing now is to find a way to keep the current playerbase engaged and draw in some new players as things start to improve.
With the holidays right around the corner, there is definitely the opportunity to bring some new players into the game if the title seems a serious price cut for Black Friday and other shopping deals. The game could capitalize on that by getting Kate Bishop into the wild sometime later this month and, hopefully, following up with Clint before the end of 2020.
At this point, Clint arriving before 2020 feels like a serious long shot. It certainly wouldn’t be the end of the world for players to just have Kate and the AIM Cloning Lab as the new content that holds them through the rest of 2020, but the sooner the game can get onto a predictable schedule the better off it will be. Currently, many fans on social media and forums seem to be experiencing a lack of confidence in the future of the game and that can make people want to not dump any additional hours into a title.
Even if new heroes are launching every two months instead of every month, it would be great if players could have some confidence in what is coming and roughly when it will arrive. It makes sense that that devs want to avoid exact release dates, because those have only led to disappointment so far, but in order to build some goodwill with the playerbase and start to create confidence that this is a growing title that is still alive and well, there needs to be some significant new content drop within the month and a published road map to help ease the worries of the community.
Currently, Marvel’s Avengers has two big strengths that it can lean on as it grows. First, the IP is powerful and lots of gamers would really love an ongoing Marvel title that allows them to revisit these characters often to take down new villains or explore a new zone. In addition to the power of Marvel, the game also has a very solid combat system with a great variety of gameplay from hero to hero. This is a serious boon and is one of the main reasons many players enjoyed the campaign and are still returning to the title. If the devs can keep building on that foundation with new add-on heroes, this title could definitely make a comeback and have some real staying power.
Players should check back in the near future for more updates, news, strategy guides, and weekly rotation updates. Until next time, Avengers Assemble!
Marvel’s Avengers is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions currently in development.
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