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Marvel Heroes Comes to a Quiet End

Gazillion's Marvel-based MMORPG meets its doom. (No, really, it's dead.)

Ozzie Mejia

November 15, 2017 1:15 PM

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Another MMORPG bites the dust today and this one hurts. Marvel has severed ties with Gazillion Entertainment, which means that Marvel Heroes is officially no more.

"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," reads the email from Marvel (via Kotaku). "We would like to sincerely thank the players who joined the Marvel Heroes community, and will provide any further updates as they become available."

Marvel Heroes first launched in 2013 as a free-to-play MMORPG on PC. It released to mostly positive reviews, coming across as a dungeon crawler in the vein of Diablo, which wasn't entirely a surprise given Blizzard North legend David Brevik's involvement. The game released on console as Marvel Heroes Omega less than six months ago. The console version's sudden cancellation is particuarly outrageous, given that new Heroes were being released and tied to $20 microtransaction packs as recently as October.

According to the Kotaku report, Marvel Heroes had missed some key dates in the past month, coinciding to when all forum and social media activity suddenly went silent. A major red flag was the release of "Thor: Ragnarok" coming and going with zero tie-in content from Marvel Heroes, given that the game had never missed a single tie-in opportunity in the past.

This is definitely not the first time Disney's icy cold grip of death has descended on one of its ongoing games with a dedicated fanbase. Disney pulled the plug on both of its Avengers Alliance games a little over a year ago, including the sequel that had been out less than six months. There's also the notorious cancellation of Disney Infinity that left thousands of people holding $15 paperweights. At this point, Marvel Contest of Champions players may not want to get too attached.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?