Square Enix Confirms Poor Launch of Marvel's Avengers
Square Enix finally admitted that Marvel's Avengers sold below expectations. The game still hasn't earned enough to break even. However, the publisher does not intend to abandon the project.
For some time now, there have been reports suggesting that Marvel's Avengers has done poorly in the market. Now publisher Square Enix finally admitted it. The Japanese have said that game has sold below expectations.
The flop is painful, as it caused the whole segment of the publisher's high-budget HD games (the other two being MMOs and browser/mobile titles) to record losses in the past quarter. Without Avengers , the division would have made some profit. However, CEO Yosuke Matsuda does not intend to give up on the project. He hopes that with the planned additional content, the company will eventually be able to turn this failure into success.
Square Enix hopes that the DLCs and updates will fix the game before the end of the current fiscal year, i.e. March 31, 2021. At least until then, we can therefore expect the project to be developed intensively.
Marvel's Avengers have done so poorly that the project has yet to break even. It is worth recalling that analysts estimate its development budget at USD 170-190 million and sales at only 3 million copies.
I asked my colleague, Cruiser, who is the biggest fan of Marvel's Avengers among our editorial staff, for a comment.
"It's no secret that Marvel 's Avengers is not in the best condition - the player base beyond Sony's console has virtually dropped to zero, and even on the aforementione platform, fewer and fewer players reach for the game. To top it all off, the October/November update scheduled to introduce a new heroine - Kate Bishop - has been delayed to December, while the widely advertised tachyon rifts proved to be a repetition of the already well known missions with a slight twist in mechanics.
Release of new content will therefore be a huge test, as the announcements about the campaign accompanying Kate sound promising. The quality of these "operations" will, in my opinion, determine the final "be or not to be" for Avengers."
Marvel's Avengers was released on September 4, on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Google Stadia. Releases for Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 are also planned, but have been delayed until next year.
