Marvel Future Revolution

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

~ the eulogy ~

In 2021 I was an engineer in Ankara working on computer vision, and a free open-world Marvel game for phones was never going to be part of my life. This grave is written entirely from the outside. It is worth writing for the shape of the ending rather than for the game, which by most accounts was competent.

Marvel Future Revolution came out of Netmarble Monster in Seoul, the studio that had already made Marvel: Future Fight in 2015 and is still running it. Netmarble announced the new one on 1 March 2020 and put it into open beta in a handful of regions on 1 July 2021. The global release was 25 August 2021. It ran on Unreal Engine 4 and it looked like it, and reviewers kept reaching for the word console.

The setting was Secret Wars, which in Marvel terms means a patchwork planet stitched together out of colliding Earths. That gave the writers permission to put a Hydra-ruled New York next to an Asgardian region, and to have several versions of the same character walk around arguing with each other. It reviewed well for what it was. Metacritic settled at 78 on iPhone, and in June 2022 Apple handed it a Design Award for innovation.

What it never had was roster. A reviewer at launch counted eight playable characters against the 272 available in Future Fight by then, which is a strange number to bring to a Marvel game. The whole pitch of a Marvel game is that you get to pick.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Downloads passed ten million. There were two soundtrack releases on Hollywood Records, the second of them performed live by the Beethoven Academy Orchestra alongside the Video Game Orchestra in May 2022. That is not the sort of money a publisher spends on something it has already decided to abandon. Netmarble was treating this as a second flagship Marvel property rather than a side bet.

~ the unraveling ~

On 27 October 2022, fourteen months in, Netmarble posted a notice saying it would be reducing the scale of service. That is the phrase a company uses when the decision has already been made and it wants to deliver the announcement in two parts. The updates got smaller after that date and stayed smaller.

Live-service games die on content velocity. Once the pipeline slows, the players who spent the most money notice first, because they are the ones who finish everything the week it ships. When Netmarble finally wrote the shutdown notice in June 2023 it pointed back at that October date itself, which is an unusually direct thing to admit in public.

~ the day it died ~

On 2 June 2023 Netmarble disabled in-app purchases and published the end date in the same notice. The gap between the two was almost three months, which is generous by mobile standards and meant nobody spent money on something they would not get to use.

The servers went off on 25 August 2023, two years to the day from the global launch. Picking the anniversary was a choice somebody made. It reads as a company deciding that if the thing had to end, it would end on a number that looked deliberate rather than on whatever Tuesday the accounting happened to fall on. Marvel: Future Fight, the 2015 game this one was built to succeed, is still running.

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