Marvel Heroes

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

~ the obit ~

marvel heroes was the second act of david brevik's post-blizzard career. brevik had been one of the core blizzard north designers behind diablo and diablo ii. after blizzard north's leadership left in 2003 he was at flagship studios for the hellgate london stretch, and after flagship folded he started gazillion entertainment in 2009 with the goal of building a free-to-play action-rpg with a marvel-character skin on it. marvel signed off and gazillion shipped the game on june 4 2013. for a while it was one of the better-running f2p arpgs on pc.

the killing was external. through 2017 the gaming press began reporting on sexual-misconduct allegations against gazillion ceo dave dohrmann. disney, which by that point owned marvel and was running its licenses with new caution, terminated the agreement on november 15. gazillion initially announced a december 31 shutdown date. a week later the studio's creditors moved faster than that, and the servers went off on november 27. every employee was fired without severance the same morning, the monday after thanksgiving.

marvel heroes was not really aimed at me. the marvel-fan audience that drove its launch was a different demographic from the post-counter-strike pc-gamer crowd i was part of in turkey, and by 2013 i was already several years into a real engineering career and not paying much attention to free-to-play arpgs. but david brevik comebacks have a small reserved spot in pc-gaming press the way john romero comebacks do, and i remember following the launch coverage because it was the second time in a decade he was trying to build "diablo, but with another universe's iconography on top."

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the brevik return ~

gazillion entertainment was founded in 2009 in san mateo with the express purpose of making marvel-licensed games. the first product, super hero squad online, was a kids-mmo on the marvel side that ran 2011-2014. marvel heroes was the bigger bet: a brevik-led action-rpg with diablo bones and the entire marvel character roster as playable heroes. the launch in june 2013 was rough. the game pivoted hard through 2014 and emerged as marvel heroes 2015, which was meaningfully better than what had shipped at launch.

brevik left in january 2016 as ceo, replaced by dave dohrmann. the game continued under dohrmann's leadership for two more years.

~ the disney exit ~

disney's marvel team had been getting more conservative about licensee behavior for years. when kotaku and other outlets started reporting in late 2017 that dohrmann had been credibly accused of inappropriate behavior toward staff, the license came up for review. on november 15 disney terminated the marvel agreement. gazillion initially said a december 31 shutdown date, but the studio's creditors moved faster. by november 27 the servers were off, and the gazillion staff were called into a single meeting that morning to be told they were unemployed.

~ what survived ~

the console version, marvel heroes omega, had shipped only five months before the shutdown, on june 30 2017 for ps4 and xbox one. console players who had spent money in the cash shop a few weeks earlier got nothing back. the broader cultural footprint is the second brevik-led pedigree-collapse story, which now reliably gets cited alongside hellgate london in any pc-gaming retrospective on "developers who left blizzard north." marvel itself eventually moved its game licensing to insomniac for the spider-man franchise and to crystal dynamics for avengers, the latter of which is also dead.

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