12/02/2008

No more Marvel MMO.

I'll be honest, I have never got into the massively multi-player on-line role playing game scene. This is partly down to never having the time, never wanting to pay monthly and at one point in my life working for one of the developers of such a title... That didn't end well.

But despite all this I was excited about the prospect of the Marvel MMO (Marvel Universe Online). The game announced in 06 at X06 promised much and was being developed by Cryptic Studios (it even had a snappy teaser trailer), the guys behind City of Heroes. A perfect match if ever I heard one.

On top of that it was going to tie into current Marvel comics and be written by current Marvel writers. The idea makes me wet myself just a little with excitement.

But sadly, the dream has been crushed and Microsoft have pulled the plug on the title. MTV had an informative and interesting interview with Shane Kim the head of MS game studios, he said the following:

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of what went wrong, I don’t know that that’s the right way to put it. For us we look at our priorities and all of the things we have to do… When we first entered into the development and agreement of the development of ‘Marvel Universe Online,’ we thought we would create another subscription-based MMO. And if you really look at the data there’s basically one that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success... There’s a whole bunch of factors.”

So it's dead, long has MS flirted with the idea of an MMO on its home console set up, but at this time, it just doesn't seem to be viable.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't have played this but it does look like it'd be a fucking addictive game, shame they're not gonna see it all the way through. A Jedi version would also be equally cool :)