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Marvel Heroes Omega - Three Lessons I Learned From the Gazillion Shutdown - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Marvel Heroes Omega - Three Lessons I Learned From the Gazillion Shutdown - MMORPG.com
As I’ve been playing games for decades, the red flags of what Gazillion did were stark, and often. As we currently live in an unprecedented era of gaming, and by unprecedented I mean an era of gaming where monetization is affluent, in many cases, when the game is not only unfinished, but these days monetization happens with nary more than an idea or grasp of a game is apparent, I still believed that brand integrity meant something. Oh, how wrong I turned out to be.
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soon after they left, the design decision and focus shifted horribly (or they left because of this, who knows ...) and this fiasco is the direct result of it.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Yes, it did.
Very insightful comment about throwing money at a game in hopes it will pick your interest up. I've done this any number of times with games over the past few years, most notably with WoW. Bored. New mount maybe? What's for sale in the store? When I'm logging into a game to find out what's on sale in the cash shop, I know I've gone too far.
Good article.
I didnt play it year or so, but year ago the game was generally considered very decent Diablo clone. And honestly was real blast to play.
The sunk cost fallacy is very, very persuasive. Placing convenience items behind individual paywalls is a double whammy. "The game will be more fun with this mount!" Buys mount. "Oh, it's not much different. But if I don't play it now I'll have wasted the money I spent on the mount!"
All of us are susceptible to that kind of thinking, so don't take this as me criticizing you. It's more a criticism of how microtransactions are structured around these games in a way that's not at all consumer friendly.
*sigh* It's comments like this that keeps us locked into stale fantasy settings and tropes.
There's nothing inherently wrong with superhero or sci-fi settings. Correlation is not causation! Name one MMO that died because it didn't conform to the fantasy cliche.
When you look at the post mortems the vast majority of failed MMO's never had a viable post-launch operations plan. A good chunk simply don't have the professional discipline necessary to maintain a functional 24x7 service. MMO's are not the disposable software many of the hacks that call themselves games developers are trained to produce. Not to mention the plethora of design gaffes that plague us to this day (ProTip: Western audiences hate grinding)
And when the manure hits the fan their Customer Disservice departments actively insult their customers. Way to make that brand shine! There is no excuse in the world to be stingy over pixels especially when a customer suffers loss due to bugs.
Before blaming "the setting" or the "lore" take a hard look at their operational support, customer service and development teams and ask yourself if you'd trust them to write a high availability web presence. Then look to see how predatory their business model is. Do the designers have too much of a hard-on for their own lore? etc.
flame off
You didn't actually mention that Gazillion was still selling things on the PC version, even after they lost the license.
Here is a discord chat log of a developer admitting this.
https://ibb.co/einZcw
Easy to verify, just go to their discord (http://www.discord.gg/marvelheroes) and search for "Zurick".
No idea how this isn't a bigger deal actually.
The drive for cash before you get the product is now huge, we used to pay for a box that had a game we could play right away. Now with pre-order, cash shops open before the game launches, land sales, ship sales, it is all about paying before you see anything for your money. With gambling boxes, it just reaches a new low.
The Marvel community was one of the best I have seen. In fact friends I were gaming with would say stuff like "Come on have you finished yet in chat about the way the films should have been, or what happened in some series you never saw? Can we play now?"
The lesson I learned is to not spend money on Marvel games anymore just like I decided to do the same for DC after they shut down Infinite Crisis.
Both Marvel and DC are terrible in the way they treat their gamers and they don't even attempt to try which is the part that baffles my mind cause they have two of the most beloved IP's in the world. I guess the earnings from one movie can equal to 10-100 times more profit with 1/15th the effort of making a quality game so it is understandable that they don't but it still makes me sad nonetheless.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Edit: Actually I did spend some money. I bought a few inventory packs. I believe their monetization scheme failed. They wanted people to buy heroes to pay for the game. People found with a little time and effort they could easily get heroes without paying.
I learned no lesson from all this. I spent money sporadically, but money was spent. It was a F2P game that was 100% not P2W, and I appreciated that. It had really good people in the community and behind the scenes (at one point), and I don't regret a damn thing about my time (or money) spent there. I didn't get into the console version (thankfully), so I really hold no ill-will towards the people that made the game. I *will* be wary of some of them should they become involved in other games, though.
It was good for new players on PC. Console content was seriously lacking and the Biggest Update Ever ruined the game for many on PC. Gazillion lied repeatedly to players and they were ready to milk them up to the point of the license expiring last June.
A lot of potential players seem to look down on comic characters in games. I'm not sure why, but it is an issue that exists. Even I don't quite understand the appeal of super heroes in typical MMO settings. But I don't see the issue in an ARPG or MOBA. License holders are VERY limiting though and tend do prevent quick turnaround of content or flexibility toward changes that are good for the game.
It was a decent game for the most part - I actually played it during beta and launch, and on and off since then. It had its ups and downs, but most would agree the game placed too much focus on making money, and not on the content. All development focus were on costumes basically, with next to no gameplay content in the past couple of years. In fact, when they debuted on the consoles the PC version was basically dumbed down, and then abandoned, which had angered a lot of players.
The BUE is different from the NGE in terms of intent, too. The NGE was an attempt to revitalize the game. The BUE instead was just dumbing the game down so it could work on consoles (they claimed it was to revitalize the game but that was revealed to be a huge fat lie).