Rumors have been floating around for months about the demise of the Marvel MMO being developed by Cryptic Studios. The rumors have now been confirmed by Shane Kim, head of Microsoft Games Studios in a recent interview with the MTV Multiplayer Blog.
First, I asked if the game was truly canceled. He said: “I’ll confirm. Marvel and we have agreed to end development on the MMO. It was an amicable decision…. It’s just something that we felt that, for us and for them, it would be better if we ended development. Which is disappointing, because that had a lot of promise. But sometimes you have to make these decisions.”
Cue the natural follow-up: What went wrong?
“I don’t think it’s necessarily a case of what went wrong,” Kim told me. “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. It’s a tough space. It’s a very competitive space. And it’s a space that’s changing quite a bit. …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. And then you have to look [and say]: ‘Can we change the business model for that? Is that really viable given how far we are in development? And so forth. Does Marvel want to do that?’ There’s a whole bunch of factors.”
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