News went out recently that the Marvel Universe MMO game had been canceled. I finally got around to reading the interview with Shane Kim, head of Microsoft Games Studios where he talks about the reasons why. It all boils down to they didn't think a standard monthly subscription model would work and they had gone too far into development to change to another model. Smells more like they didn't know what they were doing and realized nobody would pay for what they were making.
I was really curious about how they were going to make the game work. If you are making a Marvel Universe MMO, you are really selling people on the idea of actually playing Marvel heroes such as Spider-man, Wolverine, and the Hulk. Nobody was going to be happy just being another nobody who suddenly found one day that he had super-powers and then you had to grind your way into being somebody. This is the lesson everybody else learned from Star Wars Galaxies. Nobody wants to be Uncle Owen, everybody wants to be light saber wielding Jedi's.
I really find it annoying that they blew this with so many of Marvel's properties doing so well right now. The Spider-man and X-Men movie franchises are doing great and I hear good things about the latest Hulk movie, still haven't been to see it myself.
Personally. I am going to just say they are idiots. They blew it. I am going to rest easy in this knowledge because I applied to be a designer on that project. I am a game designer with a plethora of published games under my belt, lots of experience with MMO's, and am a big Marvel comic book collecting zombie. I even won a "no prize!" They didn't even think I warranted a phone call. I simply can't understand why, when a resume like mine fell onto their desk, they didn't say, "Hey, lets at least talk to this guy and see what he's about." Now I know they are just idiots and thankfully I avoided that bullet.
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