The free-to-play game Marvel Heroes Omega (for PC/Mac, PS4, and XBone) has officially had all services permanently discontinued and servers shut down effective today. This is following Disney's recent decision to cut ties with the game's developer, Gazillion Entertainment, last week on Nov. 15th. The official statement from Disney read: "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."

As a result of the news, Gazillion issued an official statement on their forums saying that "The Marvel Heroes servers will stay on until Dec 31, 2017, and we’ll be removing real money purchases as soon as possible. Players will be able to play the game entirely for free once this sunset period commences. We will share the exact date things go completely free as soon as we can", but on Nov. 22nd, Thanksgiving eve, their entire staff were laid off and the game's closure was abruptly bumped up to today, the 24th. Two employees of Gazillion, Anthony Gallegos and Andrew Hair, had taken to twitter on Nov. 22nd to report that none of the developers are receiving severance or PTO payouts, with coverage for medical insurance ending in just 8 days. The announcement to close the game was made by the devs through their official Discord server on the 22nd.

This was a game with a free-to-play model, so microtransactions were the core source of revenue for the company. With the sudden closure of the game, players have begun to request refunds for content, on which some have paid upwards of $400. Unfortunately, all requests for refunds were initially denied, with Microsoft later deciding to offer a 90-day grace period for refunds. Apparently, Gazillion's terms of service for this game had always stated that the company reserved the right to terminate the game, as well as any previously purchased in-game content, at any time and at their discretion, a clause which is apparently very common in games with this F2P model. This is just yet another example of the transience and instability of digital goods purchased in video games.

For context: the first iteration of this game, known simply as 'Marvel Heroes', had a very rough launch in 2014, scoring an average 58 on metacritic and copious amounts of bugs and imbalances being reported by the player-base. The company made many updates to the game in an effort to correct these issues in a 2015 revision which game to be known as 'Marvel Heroes 2015.' Following this update, the average metacritic score rose to 81, and the game enjoyed a moderate financial success, though Gazillion was still forced to lay off some staff. Then, in January of 2016, David Brevik resigned from his position as CEO at Gazillion and David Von Dorman took over his position.

Dorman then attempted to reboot the company earlier this year with the game's final revision known as 'Marvel Heroes Omega'. While he reported that early results with the game were promising, it was having difficulty keeping players engaged and playing. In an email Dorman sent to VentureBeat, he said that “It’s obviously been a really difficult period – a turn of events that is very hard to fathom. You know we were very committed to building Gazillion and we were on that trajectory – but yes, sadly due to a series of events that happened at an incredible pace (the last 30 days) the company is preparing to wind down. I can tell you that above anything else, the management team tried as best we could to make sure our employees would be treated with respect and given severance packages. It is heart breaking that things ended up this way, but as mentioned our intent has always been to take care of our people. If we could have done this differently we would have.” The console version of this latest revision of the game was just around 6 months old at the time of closure, meaning players had very little time to enjoy their purchases before they disappeared forever. It's more than likely that it was the game's rough launch and its subsequent inability to get back on its feet over the next 3 years which contributed most to Disney's termination of their contract.

 

[SS4]

Great, lets kill off one of the few fair F2P game thats is enoyable and isn't P2W or have most endgame progression hidden behind a cashwall !! (Basically not like 100% of phone apps that pretends to be games)
Guess Disney prefer all their Marvel related games (if you can call most games) to be fucking shitty customer milking simulation which makes your IQ drop when using them. . .
Having to give some money to FOX probably pisses them off since there are X-men and mutants in there (Yeah FOX copyrighted the word mutant). Ohh someone else then us is getting some profit out of this game, Lets kill it with fire!!!
GG Disney, you fucking suck and proved it once again you greedy pigs!

 

[Xzi]

wah..
what is this game?

I played it for about an hour, hoping it would get better the entire time. It did not.

Great, lets kill off one of the few fair F2P game thats is enoyable and isn't P2W or have most endgame progression hidden behind a cashwall !! (Basically not like 100% of phone apps that pretends to be games)
Guess Disney prefer all their Marvel related games (if you can call most games) to be fucking shitty customer milking simulation which makes your IQ drop when using them. . .
Having to give some money to FOX probably pisses them off since there are X-men and mutants in there (Yeah FOX copyrighted the word mutant). Ohh someone else then us is getting some profit out of this game, Lets kill it with fire!!!
GG Disney, you fucking suck and proved it once again you greedy pigs!

Nothing of value was lost. If you want a F2P game that's actually good try Path of Exile on Steam. It's really truly F2P, too. You can buy cosmetics, everything else is earned through progression as it should be. Think a massively enhanced Diablo 2 which has recently been updated with ten total acts. You play from start to endgame in one play-through.

 

[Clydefrosch]

Can someone explain the lady Spider-Man? She looks pretty cool.

its spider-gwen, gewn stacy from an alternate reality using tech to imitate spider powers. might have actual spider powers by now.

 

[aaronz77]

Happy Holidays to the devs!

 

[Yil]

its spider-gwen, gewn stacy from an alternate reality using tech to imitate spider powers. might have actual spider powers by now.

I thought the one imitating Spider Power was Spider Woman.

 

[KingVamp]

Are there any f2p or MMO games that are peer to peer?

 

[FAST6191]

Are there any f2p or MMO games that are peer to peer?

There are a few more on the proof of concept side that use block chain type tech.
http://huntercoin.org/ being one of the more notable.

Most of what I am seeing sort of reminds of torrents before they figured out distributed trackers/swarm hosted trackers.

For a traditional mmo you could probably do a shard/raid/whatever they call it in your chosen game as peer to peer somewhat more easily.

 

[Yil]

Are there any f2p or MMO games that are peer to peer?

That would mean losing some level of control so clearly no.

There are a few more on the proof of concept side that use block chain type tech.
http://huntercoin.org/ being one of the more notable.

Most of what I am seeing sort of reminds of torrents before they figured out distributed trackers/swarm hosted trackers.

For a traditional mmo you could probably do a shard/raid/whatever they call it in your chosen game as peer to peer somewhat more easily.

MMO started in China as F2P. 10 years later mobile games and later premium games copied that, and we reach that point today.

 

[FAST6191]

That would mean losing some level of control so clearly no.

How so? Combine a conventionally cryptographically signed message with one of those smart contract type block chains (said chains probably even have signing functionality you can use) and you have your funding/payment sorted. Send updates over p2p like loads have done before and p2p games/user hosted servers can handle the rest.

 

[chartube12]

That would mean losing some level of control so clearly no.

MMO started in China as F2P. 10 years later mobile games and later premium games copied that, and we reach that point today.

and japan started the loot craze in the late 70s early 80s with grab bags. They sell grab bags for transformers n kids wouldnt know what transformer they get until it was opened. now that shit is in video games...but that's a topic for another thread.

my point is asian countries seem to start all these anticustomer practices and the world seemly supports them without question

 

[TangentingTangerines]

Two employees of Gazillion,Anthony Gallegosand Andrew Hair, had taken to twitter on Nov. 22nd to report that none of the developers are receiving severance or PTO payouts, with coverage for medical insurance ending in just 8 days.​

No surprise there. Disney always treats their employees like shit and find ways to cheat people out of their contracts, yet people still keep on buying their products. They're like the EA of the Movie industry.

 

[Meteor7]

No surprise there. Disney always treats their employees like shit and find ways to cheat people out of their contracts, yet people still keep on buying their products. They're like the EA of the Movie industry.

To be fair, Anthony and Andrew were employees of Gazillion Entertainment, not Disney.

 

[chango]

This is one of the reasons why people prefer physical games.

Right, because a vanilla launch Final Fantasy 11 or Maple Story 1.0 CDROM would make any bit of difference in cases like this one.

 

[KingVamp]

Right, because a vanilla launch Final Fantasy 11 or Maple Story 1.0 CDROM would make any bit of difference in cases like this one.

Not to mention, this is coming from a mainly console player POV, so that lowers the margin even more so. Doesn't matter, most physical games aren't online or mmo only games.

I was comparing this to digital only games, but of course some people have to dwell on the exceptions to the "rule". Since we are back to this subject tho.

As said, maybe most, if not, all these games shouldn't be able to release without an offline mode or at least a peer to peer mode. So your money wouldn't just go down the drain once the devs/pubs decide to shutdown the servers.

 

[chartube12]

To be fair, Anthony and Andrew were employees of Gazillion Entertainment, not Disney.

They are...were the two big guys incharge of gazillion. What the two meant was, they are unable to pay their empoyees. As I pointed out early, Gazillion's main source and only stable source of income was Disney. Without the game, they are worse than broke. I expect them to claim bankruptcy any day now!

 

[gamesquest1]

I wonder if this decision was made before the battlefront 2 drama and Disney are/were planning to hand over the reigns of marvel to ea because they did such a "good" job sucking the bone marrow out of star wars

 

[chartube12]

I wonder if this decision was made before the battlefront 2 drama and Disney are/were planning to hand over the reigns of marvel to ea because they did such a "good" job sucking the bone marrow out of star wars

there was lots of behind the senses drama at gazillion apparantly. i believe disney as a "family" company didnt want any ties to it. for instant andrew has charges for harrassment of both sexual and non-sexual behavor against him from coworkers. Anthony believed to have had serious gambling issues. The original cso n founder, dave left the company to presue other projects.

Nothing i believe can be done anymore. the company is officially gone has of the 25th. debters lquiadated most of thier property.