"We're confident that we’ll see PC players return," says Marvel's Avengers dev amidst reports of dwindling player base
Crystal Dynamics has big plans for Marvel's Avengers, and the developer says what's coming will bring back lapsed players.
Marvel's Avengers seems to have vanished off the face of the Earth. Though it only released in September, the game rarely comes up in conversations online, which is the opposite of what you want from a service game in that style.
A combination of bugs, lack of meaningful endgame content and big gaps in communication from developer Crystal Dynamics have caused players to give up on the game. As noted by Forbes, Avengers' Steam numbers are dangerously close to dipping below 1,000 concurrent.
Even at the best of times, the game never really had a massive audience, peaking at only 31,000 at launch on Steam. The most obvious side effect of such a small player base is that it extends matchmaking times beyond what most players find reasonable, if the game could place in you in a match at all. The sheer number of matchmade activities in Avengers, coupled with the fact you can only have one of the same hero per party don't help, either.
But Crystal Dynamics is not worried. Following a few weeks of radio silence, the developer has emerged, telling Kotaku in a statement that the content Avengers is getting in the next few weeks and beyond will bring lapsed players back.
Here's what studio head Scot Amos had to say.
"To our players: every day we fight to make the best game possible for our community. We have a great community management team at Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix who funnel all of your concerns, suggestions, and feedback to the development team daily. We are listening. We are making fixes, improvements, and additions as fast as we safely can to make Marvel’s Avengers the game we all aspire it to be.
"As such, we have a number of new content pieces coming in the weeks ahead including: a totally new War Zone mission type called Tachyon Rifts, a new Outpost that’s a jumping off point for new story missions in the future, and AIM’s Cloning Lab, which requires a coordinated high-level group of four players to beat with new top-end loot rewards for finishing it. And in each of these updates we do tuning and bug fixing to enhance the overall experience.
"In addition, we’ve announced two new Heroes coming in the near future: Kate Bishop in Operation: Taking AIM, and after that the double-feature Operation starring Clint Barton… this is the “two Hawkeyes” we mentioned in the last War Table. These new Operations pick up right from where the main Reassemble campaign ended in the core game and will propel the overall world story forward with new mysteries and villains, as well as new multi-player content.
"Lastly, we will continue to add new content to the game in the coming months as we address issues and overall game balance, including loot distribution and quality of life features everyone is clamouring for to improve our day-to-day experience from accessibility to co-op communication tools to balancing the economy!
"We are confident that we’ll see PC players (as well as those on Xbox One and PlayStation 4) return to the game as we add exciting new late-game content and demonstrate that we continue to be focused on improving the game.
"We’ll have more information and details about the very near content drops in a blog scheduled for next week and we have new community communication initiatives coming soon to even more directly share fun and useful information with you. Thank you for coming with us on this journey to truly realize the best of what Marvel’s Avengers can become."