“Gazillion Entertainment’s Marvel Heroes is a quite popular Diablo like online MMO that lets players take control of a wide variety of famous (and not so famous) characters from Marvel’s vast universe. The game even got ported to PS4 and Xbox One earlier this year as Marvel Heroes Omega. Unfortunately, Disney, who owns Marvel, recently confirmed to Kotaku that they have ended their relationship with Gazillion Entertainment, and are shutting down Marvel Heroes on all platforms.
Some players suspected something was up with the game in recent months, as the developers missed several standard weekly updates, never implemented a Halloween event, and missed the deadline for their Thor: Ragnarok tie-in Thor Gladiator Pack, which was supposed to come out on October 27. You can check out the full statement by Disney/Marvel below:
“We regret to inform our Marvel Heroes fans that we have ended our relationship with Gazillion Entertainment, and that the Marvel Heroes games will be shut down. We would like to sincerely thank the players who joined the Marvel Heroes community, and will provide any further updates as they become available.”
It is always a shame to see online titles like this get shuttered, as it means no players will ever be able to experience them in the future. I played the title a bit back in 2014 and had my fun with it, though I did notice that it was quite rough around the edges. The games initial launch was quite tumultuous, with former Creative Director Jeff Donais confirming to Kotaku that there were several rounds of layoffs after the game’s launch and that the rest of the developer were working tirelessly on the game:
“[The lay-offs] would definitely not be the fault of the internal men and women who actually worked on the game itself or served the customers. . . It was a real thing that people didn’t see their families as much as they should, or sacrificed their health to work an 80-hour week when an important patch deadline was looming. . . The patch release schedule, especially when PC was the main focus, was aggressively insane.”
We will be sure to let you know if Marvel or Disney provides any more clarification on why exactly they decided to end their partnership with Gazillion and shut Marvel Heroes down. While Marvel Heroes will no longer be available soon, the game did make its way to PC, PS4, and Xbox One.