Still reeling from the abrupt early sunset of Marvel Heroes yesterday? Same here. If you want a little closure, maybe check out Kinda Funny Games, which yesterday posted an interview with former Gazillion Systems Designer Anthony Gallegos, who discusses the collapse of the studio.
Gallegos suggests that Gazillion is going through “some kind of bankruptcy” and notes actually furloughed employees a week and a half before the layoffs – and indeed, lost a quarter of its staff from layoffs earlier this year. He also confirms that the license (he says “contract”) for Marvel Heroes was lost in October and negotiations with Disney/Marvel began anew.
This was a time when Gazillion reps were telling the press and the playerbase that “the company [was] functioning normally.” It clearly was not.
“This isn’t like a ‘Disney’s the bad guy thing,'” he says. “There were obligations that Gazillion had in this contract, and something must have not worked out, and so Marvel had pulled the plug.” The frustration, he said, was that the team had a ton of new content just awaiting a button push to go live, like a new Thor and Spiderwoman. And the new game to make Gazillion more than a one-game studio was actually happening; it was two employees working on materials to “shop around.”
“The biggest shame of it (outside of the employees not getting their PTO or anything like that – no severance, which sucks) is that for the people who bought it on console, they had the game in March, and now it’s gone.”
The interview’s down below; the meat begins around 5 minutes and runs another 20.
In the meantime, as we reported yesterday, Microsoft is completing refunds for all Marvel Heroes Omega purchases on Xbox One – in fact, we’ve now had reports that those refunds are happening automatically, even for Xbox One players who didn’t contact Microsoft at all.
