Oh, I’m not saying it’s a smart decision to go into business with Disney on this stuff. Just that there will be plenty of suckers lining up to do it, because the possibility of those piles of cash are hard to resist.
That’s fair, considering all the me-too MMOs, survival sims, MOBAs, etc.
I would have thought it was pretty simple, don’t do anything that impacts the value of the IP. If you have a CEO with allegations of sexual misconduct, stand him down and deliver reasonable monetisation systems with no p2w whatsoever.
If Disney thinks this will be blamed on Gazillion instead of them, they are dreaming.
Disney could clearly give a damn about the Marvel fans who sunk their money into the game and ended up with only a handful of months to play with their “licenses.” Just because you can shut things down with zero advance notice under your terms does not mean that it’s a good idea or that there will be no hit to your reputation.
Yah this was sort of my point earlier. I don’t blame Gazillion, but Disney…well. I’ve had friends that work at Disney, so I have a long standing gripe with them to begin with, doesn’t take much fuel for me to just never buy anything they are involved with again. Regardless of the situation, Disney or Marvel have more than enough money to have stepped in and tried to retain at least some kind humanity with an IP they are associated with.
Exactly.
“We could afford to not screw our paying fans, but that would take some effort. And giving a damn.”
I think they’re banking on most people not really giving a darn either way.
I agree with you. I’d wager they believe this is a consequence-free choice that they made.
I think for the most part, it is. They’ve shut down plenty of f2p games before, including the 2 Marvel Avengers games, both doing well. They’ll shut down anything not performing to expectation, and then deal with it if there’s a huge public outcry, like the Star Wars Battlefront 2 issue,
Whew! This is some read.
That really sucks. I had no idea Gallegos was at Gazillion - I remember him fondly from GFW Radio.
So it is confirmed: it is with little dollars that you build up big dividends. Gotta catch’em all!
They didn’t even pay out PTO. Severe mismanagement from Gazillion executives.
Gallegos even used Chuff Money as his handle on the MH forums. Shame about his current situation.
I hope he and his dog are okay :(
Oh, that was him? He always seemed like a pleasant guy. I wish him well.
Apparently Trion Worlds just bought all of Gazillion’s assets. Odds are they would not be able to revive Marvel Heroes as the Marvel license expired but they did say they are looking at it. Not really sure what else Trion get out of the purchase but maybe there was some tech behind the game they could spin into something else?
Ouside character design, I figure most of their game would be directly transferable to any generic modern-day action RPG. Trion doesn’t have any IP worth mentioning and their reputation for P2W is absolute dogshit so I don’t expect anything I care about to come out of this, but they didn’t pay money for nothing.
Character design was the core of the appeal. But yeah, could see some other ARPG being built on the bones.
Hah, I spent a few minutes this afternoon googling Trion Worlds and Gazillion (including first mis-reading the direction of the acquisition) to try to figure out why I had an account they were emailing me about. I’d only ever tried Marvel Heroes long ago when the Mac version made it to beta, so I had no idea what I’d signed up for that warranted the notification of the acquisition.