Marvel's Avengers hasn't had the warmest reputation since it launched last year, but now we've got some words from Square Enix's president about its own internal reception.
In Square Enix's annual report for 2021, president Yosuke Matsuda says that Marvel's Avengers was an ambitious GaaS (Games as a Service) release. However, Avengers was not as successful as the company would have liked.
"We overcame a variety of unexpected difficulties in the final phase of the game’s development, including needing to transition to work-from-home due to the pandemic. We were able to surmount these challenges and release the game, but it has unfortunately not proven as successful as we would have liked," Matsuda says.
Matsuda said Square Enix would learn from its experience with Avengers and work to produce games that "mesh with the unique attributes and tastes of our studios and development teams."
"Nonetheless, taking on the GaaS model highlighted issues that we are likely to face in future game development efforts such as the need to select game designs that mesh with the unique attributes and tastes of our studios and development teams," said Matsuda. "While the new challenge that we tackled with this title produced a disappointing outcome, we are certain that the GaaS approach will grow in importance as gaming becomes more service oriented."
While Matsuda doesn't outright say it, it looks like he thinks that Crystal Dynamics's pedigree and particular skillset just didn't mesh well with the GaaS service model of Marvel's Avengers. After all, the studio is best known for single-player games like its Tomb Raider reboot. The developer is also working with The Initiative on the Perfect Dark reboot, another presumably single-player game.
As if this revelation wasn't bad enough, yesterday Crystal Dynamics removed paid XP boosters from the game's in-game marketplace after fan backlash, apologizing that it didn't listen sooner.
George Yang is a freelance news writer for IGN