Marvel Avengers Academy

» see avengersacademygame.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Marvel films landed in Turkey the same week they landed everywhere else, so this one is not a question of geography. It is a question of what a thirty-two year old engineer does with his phone, and in 2016 that was not tapping a cartoon Thor to make him work off a quest timer.

The premise was better than it needed to be. Marvel licensed its whole roster to TinyCo as teenagers, and the game dropped them onto a school campus that you built out building by building. Characters walked around the map on their own. You unlocked more of them by finishing missions, or by spending Infinity Gems, which were the premium currency and the reason the thing existed. Coins came from quests, gems came from your credit card, and the gap between the two was the business. Events arrived on a schedule that tracked whatever Marvel had in cinemas that month.

Reviewers split cleanly along that seam. Polygon liked the writing and the character design enough to say the game was more fun than it had any right to be. Pocket Gamer, looking at the same character design and the same paywalls, scored it four out of ten and called it free to play at its very worst. Neither of them was wrong, which is the ordinary condition of a licensed freemium title.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the second anniversary ~

On 4 February 2018 TinyCo shipped an anniversary update that changed what the game was. Coins stopped being the thing you collected. Stamina replaced them, and stamina got spent fighting on permanent battle maps rather than running the campus. Characters gained a rank on top of their level, with hit points and combat statistics attached. A city builder with a Marvel skin turned into a combat game with a Marvel skin.

That is a large thing to do to a game two years in, and studios only do it when the numbers on the original loop have stopped working. It bought about ten months.

~ the day it died ~

The announcement came on 21 December 2018, four days before Christmas, with the dates already fixed. Downloads and purchases ended on 1 January 2019. The servers ran on for another five weeks so that people who already had it installed could finish, and then stopped on 4 February, three years to the day from launch. TinyCo said it was closing the game to focus on new and innovative games. avengersacademygame.com stopped resolving some time after that, and the campus, which only ever existed on TinyCo's servers, went with it.

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