Disney has canceled Marvel Heroes, Marvel has ended its relationship with Gazillion

We can now confirm this as real, following a statement made by a Marvel representative to Massively OP. We’re updating below.

According to Kotaku, Disney has canceled Marvel Heroes – on all platforms – and nuked its business partnership with Gazillion. Here’s the message Kotaku says it received:

“We regret to inform our Marvel Heroes fans that we have ended our relationship with Gazillion Entertainment, and that the Marvel Heroes games will be shut down. We would like to sincerely thank the players who joined the Marvel Heroes community, and will provide any further updates as they become available.”

The news will not come as a shock to MMORPG players, as we’ve been chronicling the mess over at Gazillion for weeks now. We’d gone an entire month since the last formal update from the team, social media accounts have lain dormant, Halloween was bungled, negative Steam reviews were flooding in, the PC playerbase shrunk to its smallest size in four and a half years, the Thor Ragnarok promotion never happened, two community reps for the studio departed, and accusations flew from former studio employees in regard to “inappropriate conduct” toward female employees on the part of current CEO Dave Dohrmann, whose removal from the studio became the goal of some activist players.

While Gazillion issued us a statement earlier this month claiming – bizarrely – that “the company is functioning normally,” it downplayed the standing allegations as “unsubstantiated internet accusations.” The studio also refused to answer direct questions about the company’s leadership, communication plans, and missed updates. All the company said last week was that it had no news and would update everyone when it could. Reportedly, a studio rep reiterated that statement this past weekend and told in-person visitors to stay away from the company HQ (thread now deleted).

This week, former Creative Director Jeff “Doomsaw” Donais – the developer, you’ll recall, who lodged the most direct and public accusations against Dohrmann – returned to the official forums, and Redditors circulated a leak from a PC test server, which we now assume will never launch.

Kotaku also claims that “several individuals who work on the game were asked not to come into the office” earlier this week.

Update: When we reached out to Gazillion for comment, a Marvel representative told Massively OP,

“We regret to inform our Marvel Heroes fans that we have ended our relationship with Gazillion Entertainment, and that the Marvel Heroes games will be shut down. We would like to sincerely thank the players who joined the Marvel Heroes community, and will provide any further updates as they become available.”

It is not clear how long the game will remain online or why the cash shop remains active. Our sympathies to all players and staff of the studio.

I'm not going to post about it again, but know that I appreciate the kind words I've received since I left. Give them to the team who still kept working hard on it too.

I have very fond memories of late nights writing and designing. It hurts me too.

— Ryan Collins (@Ryolnir) November 15, 2017

Get caught up on our detailed coverage of this story up to now:

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