Avengers Down! Avengers Down!

Do believe I told you so!

I'll admit, it lasted much longer than I expected. Although even with that being said I am totally going to milk the fact that I told you so. I told everyone so. From the exact moment it became clear that Marvel's Avengers was going to be a Live Service I predicted it's colossal fall like clockwork and I was wrong and right. The prophecy was delayed, but it came true eventually. Which isn't to say the game didn't ever have anything resembling a fighting chance in it's inception; rather that, I think, lo and behold, the decision-makers totally undervalued the amount of effort it would take to first launch a Live Service and to break it into the top 3 services that rule the industry. Just like in the age of the MMO where everyone and their mother was launching a WOW clone and trying to just wing the 'post launch support' as they went; amateurish plans have led to amateurish embarrassments for the Live Service crowd time and time again. Which I do believe marks the last of every single one of Square Enix's many Live Service endeavours going the way of the Dodo. And good riddance!

If you've a perceptive mind on you, perhaps you can deduce what my self-righteous bragging is about. Just recently the Marvel's Avengers team announced they were hanging up the shield and killing support on the game from this point onwards. Or rather, they would be killing support after an upcoming update that will make all the cosmetics free for everyone to play around with, which is actually fairly nice of them. Although at this point they might as well make the game itself free as well before the servers shut down and the thing becomes unplayable outside of the singular core story missions. Marking the end of a game that was slated for death pretty much the second it revealed it's true nature to fans in a 'tail between the legs' demonstration presentation that is sure to live on in infamy. Topped perhaps only by the legendary moment when Valve announced Artifact, only to be met with a stadium full of boos when it was revealed to be another online card game. (Incidentally, Artifact is also no longer with us.)

Right from it's first mewling mumbles fresh from the hatchery, Avengers was the lightning rod for all the frustrations of a gaming public sick and tired with strong properties and solid games being irreparably warped in order to fit more 'monetarily promising' models. Titles like Anthem who's back was broken on the knee of corporate monetisation mandates, for a game that could have very well been promising as a single player or limited multiplayer title being forced into a environment it doesn't belong and won't thrive in, because Destiny made a lot of money with their Live Service once. That frustration did, admittedly, result in Avengers perhaps receiving a harder time than it deserved out of the box. The gameplay was decently fun and the visual presentation was somewhat pretty in it's environments and decent character models. And the boss fights, what few they were, proved engaging enough. But even the supremely jumped-up didn't have to poke far to come across genuine faults with the Avengers package that they could crucify the game for.

The lack of gameplay variety was a serious issue, and a major contributing factor for people getting very sick of the combat very fast. Every somewhat interesting unlockable outfit was locked behind purchasable cosmetics, which felt like a crime for a full priced title which just happened to also be a super hero game. Outside of the main quest the team didn't really know what to do with the end game to make it even remotely interesting to play with. The team tried to subtly make the EXP grind heavier in order to pad out player playtime and hopefully also retention. It was just scandal after scandal with this game. Even their good PR moments seemed to be muted or shortlived. Hawkeye was quickly overshadowed by the arrival Kate Bishop, who literally just felt like his 'shadow fighter' and whittled away at player's patience. Black Panther dropped with any big fanfare outside of this game's specific community. No matter what happened, Avengers just couldn't get a break.

And you know what? It never could have gotten that break. Not even conceptually. And do you know why they couldn't have? Because Live Services just can't function as an industry within gaming. Think of what a Live Service is and what it entails. A consistently maintained and played product providing constant grinding and reward incentives to players that demands excessive time commitments and encourages a little bit of 'on the side' spending to keep the lights on. Hook a couple of whales, milk them for the lionshare of profits; bob's your uncle, you've created an ecosystem exploiting the financially irresponsible for your own end, great! But what's the one heavily spent resource which is essential for all players in order to get the most out of these sorts of games? It isn't money, most every Live Service provides a free path. It's time. The ultimate resource.

Time, as I'm sure you're just so very fond of hearing, is limited. Increadibly so. And if every Live Service you play begs and pleads with you to spend two to three hours each and every day with no end because the game is updated so regularly, then how many such games can a single player feasibly maintain in their daily routine? Two at most? Consider also that there are large swathes of the gaming community who scoff at dedicating that much time and effort to a single game, and you've got a decently niche subsector of gamers being squeezed between dozens of games they cannot possibly juggle with any deftness. Unless you get in on the ground floor and score your lifelong fans back when the idea was novel and the overwhelming negatives of a potential forced addiction wee widely known, you'd have to compete for a table scraps worth of an player base, all the while praying that the small net you can afford to cast netted you a Whale or two. And Avengers was not a spry chicken to this game genre.

Live Services are largely cynical and bankrupt, in a manner that is so very obvious to the public by now. Pursuing such a model in this day and age is tantamount to slapping your audience around the face and telling them how you know that they know the trap your setting but you expect them to tie themselves to it anyway under the vain hope that the enjoyment of the game outweighs the crushing expectation to play incessantly. And it rarely does. Marvel's Avengers was just one of Square Enix's many attempts to secure a cash cow in this drained-dry market and it performed about as well as they deserved. Which is why I cannot but stand baffled at the fact that Square threw away all of it's western companies claiming they don't know how to work a profit out of them, considering they paid literally no attention to the flagging trends of the market and flopped each one of it's franchises on it's face in front of everyone repeatedly. (You reap what you sow, I guess.)

The Avengers game should have been a co-op multiplayer game that followed a single strong main storyline and maybe pursued a traditional DLC structure for some additional adventures; the brand was certainly big enough to score a great swathe of sales with that model and that was all Avengers had the framework to be in the first place. Not every game can become an Online megahit just by throwing some rogue strings of Netcode in the software; just look at Fallout 76- that game has struggled to do anything significant since the Wastelanders Update raised expectations apparently way too high nearly three years ago. There's something to be said for playing to your strengths and not wadding too far from your obvious specialities; and there was a perfect gap in the market for a team-based co-op title just waiting to be filled. Or at least a single-player team-based super hero game. But no, Avengers snoozed and Guardians of the Galaxy took the crown. Alas, poor Avengers... I knew them well, Matsuda-San.