The Warner Bros. platform fighting game MultiVersus is shutting down again, this time for good. It’s a genuinely fun and addictive video game, so why is it that it’s already being shut down so soon into its lifespan? There are a few reasons as to why the game, which was a brilliant idea, failed to reach the heights it should have.

For starters, it stumbled at its re-launch. When MultiVersus first hit the scene, it was just in its beta form. It technically wasn’t officially finished. Video game betas are typically released so that development teams can get feedback from the community so they can make necessary changes and fixes for the official launch of the game. After a handful of months of the MultiVersus beta being out, it was taken offline for close to a year. While it’s sad to have the game unavailable for so long, the knowledge that it was being worked on and player feedback was being implemented was enough to put fans at ease and get excited for its triumphant return.

However, instead of using the ten months away to fix issues and improve upon the game, the development team, Player First Games, decided to rebuild the game completely from scratch. This resulted in a different and equally-broken version of the game being released at the official launch. Now there were new issues that needed fixing, and new glitches, bugs, and balancing problems hurting the game. Fans expected to play a polished version of the beta they loved, but got the same buggy mess thrown at them instead. This obviously led to a rather rocky launch.

The way the developers handled microtransactions also holds part of the blame. Obviously, a free-to-play game will need microtransactions; they need to make money off of the game somehow. That being said, they went about them with a horrible strategy. The cosmetics were outrageously high. A costume for a character to wear, regardless of how cool, shouldn’t be worth $10-$20. You could get an entire game for that price, but here you’re essentially paying for a picture since it doesn’t affect gameplay. Relying on a small amount of people paying a large amount of money is much harder than relying on a large amount of people paying a small amount of money, and that’s exactly what they did. If a costume was a couple of bucks, more people would have been willing to shell out some money here and there.

Of course, the developer’s approach to the roster was also rather questionable. They chose to include characters like Banana Guard and Nubia, side characters in their respective franchises, as opposed to those that were more highly requested. Warner Bros. has a massive library of franchises in the realms of TV, movies, and video games. Many of their characters are iconic. Unfortunately, there was no inclusion of Harry Potter, The Animaniacs, The Lord of the Rings, Mad Max, The Flintstones or many other beloved IPs. Including Banana Guard instead of household names is certainly not the way to draw attention to your game. There were also some odd choices with the franchises that were represented, like having Looney Tunes without Daffy Duck, Agent Smith but no Neo from The Matrix, Shaggy and Velma but not Scooby-Doo, and Black Adam without Shazam. This was far from a great way to use a roster to attract audiences.

While the gameplay was overall a blast, there were elements that felt like a chore. Rifts, while providing a fun story mode at first, became an annoying part of the game that made players feel forced to do. The Rifts, challenges, and battle pass all felt like more of an obligation rather than an optional addition to a fun game. Sure, you could always simply jump into some online matches, but you wouldn’t earn anything if you never paid attention to the battle pass or Rifts. This doesn’t just include optional cosmetics, but the currency used to unlock playable characters as well. If you actually wanted to play as new characters, you needed to spend hours and hours grinding the challenges and Rifts. It all made the game feel more like running an errand instead of a fun game to play.

Could Player First Games have improved upon the game during the five seasons since its release? Absolutely. Instead, their priorities were in the wrong place. They put more effort into new cosmetics than fixing bugs and balancing characters. They drove what playerbase they had away, shrinking their pool of folks willing to drop $20+ per season on a single game.

As someone who really enjoys MultiVersus, from the gameplay to the wackiness of Batman facing off against Gizmo from Gremlins to the fantastic community, it’s heartbreaking and frustrating to see the developers shoot themselves in the foot and see the game fail. It was clear what was going wrong throughout the five seasons of the game, but nothing was ever done about all of it. Hopefully another game comes along that feels similar but makes much better decisions than the developers of MultiVersus.

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