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MultiVersus director Tony Huynh responded to fan backlash and death threats following the surprise announcement of the game's closure. The developers announced on MultiVersus' website that Season 5 would be the final season for the title. Many players were upset by this announcement, especially as the refund policy for microtransactions and previous purchases would not be amended following the shutdown.
Huynh wrote on X, "when there are threats to harm it’s crossing the line". He wrote at length about the difficult time this is for not just fans, but also the team at Player First Games. It's unlikely Huynh's team was directly responsible for decisions regarding the shutdown and especially the monetization, as Warner Bros. is infamous for less than consumer-friendly choices. This controversy comes hot off the heels of Warner Bros. shuttering support of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice, which also caused its own discourse.
MultiVersus Has Had a Historical Fall Following Its Release
MultiVersus initially hit the scene in 2022 with massive popularity. Its all-time Steam player high of over 150k players is roughly equivalent to Street Fighter VI, TEKKEN 8, and Mortal Kombat 1's all-time highs combined. Many in the FGC (Fighting Game Community) were discussing the game as a serious competitor to Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. franchise, which obviously served as inspiration for the title. However, as the year moved on, players began to complain about the lack of content updates, which are often how fighting games and especially live service titles retain their popularity.
Warner Bros. temporarily shut the game down in June 2023 and the title returned in May 2024. That year of downtime made players hope that they could expect something truly special come to its re-release. Unfortunately, what fans found was a game that seemed to be in a worse state than where they last left it.
Character prices were raised, with unpurchased characters even being locked out of local play, and many features such as post-match leaderboards were nowhere to be found. One of the most bizarre examples was a microtransaction offering players extra lives, which the development team claimed to be an unintended bug.
Players Feel Scammed Following the Announcement
The complicated re-launch and decline of players has led to the aforementioned closure by Warner Bros. This is where the current controversy began, as the game sported a hefty $99.99 Founders Pack which offered, among other things, 30 character unlock tokens. This becomes problematic with the announced closure since there aren't enough characters in the game to even use that many tokens.
Players were understandably frustrated, but things escalated when a fake roster leak claimed to show planned characters and several unsubstantiated anonymous comments claimed that director Tony Huynh was the primary one at fault for these issues. Huynh said, "Nobody wanted this outcome and it wasn’t from lack of caring or effort". It's unclear who or what is the primary reason for MutliVersus fall from stardom, but it's sure to become a much-discussed and investigated gaming mystery.
Source: Kotaku
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