When I played a pre-launch build of Marvel Strike Force at Game Developers Conference 2018, I’m excited to be joining the multiverse battlefield that the team at FoxNext has created. Solid turn-based combat, an ever-growing list of beloved Marvel heroes and villainsand engaging hero-collecting elements borrowed from games like Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes drew me in from leaps and bounds. I can’t wait get the launch version on my phone. When Marvel Strike Force arrived on iOS and Android in late March 2018, I immediately hooked.
The premium elements feel expensive at first but are largely unnecessary if you play the game for a decent amount and complete all your daily goals. Sure, dropping some cash will speed your progress, but I was mostly free to play for the first year of the game’s life. However, once I started spending money selectively, the microtransactions I chose felt rewarding and valuable. Unfortunately, as the game’s lifespan approaches its fifth year, transactions feel less “micro” like offers from $50 to $100 one-time more popular in the game’s marketplace, in addition to two simultaneous battle passes that cause players to buy back $20 per month.
The easy fix is to skip the premium offers and focus on gameplay instead, right? Well, that works to an extent. As I’ve mentioned before, in the early days of Marvel Strike Force, spending money was like a luxury item – nice rewards that could unlock new characters faster or power them up with no charge. need honing. These days, great event-based rewards are sometimes not earned unless you spend up to hundreds of dollars. Currently in the game events feature this character Echo offered free play to players who spent a lot of time crushing the character pieces just enough to unlock her, then rewarding those who spent some money as large as the bonus will only widen the gap between people and yes-nos.
There are plenty of free triple-A games out there that play the right way, give players a great experience, then offer extra features if they want to throw some cash at the game. Unfortunately, Marvel Strike Force is not one of them. Every step of the way, Marvel Strike Force now feels designed to let players down until they finally have to pay. It’s true that the goal of any video game is to make a profit. But when the game is designed too explicitly to ensure that the player feels bad or left out unless they regularly spend money, it shows exactly why so many people immediately lose interest when they hear a free game.
But Marvel Strike Force’s problems extend beyond the fact that it regularly sucks players’ wallets. As parent company Scopely reports huge growth and profits from its Marvel hero collection (to the tune of 70 percent growth and over $300 million in 2020 alone), the quality of the game has continued to decline. Currently, Marvel Strike Force frequently crashes when players perform certain actions in the menu. In addition to the game-breaking incident that inadvertently rewarded players with gold exponentially, causing the game will be taken offline for an entire evening in May 2021, players were suffering from glitchy microtransactions, character kits not working the way they described (usually fixed by the team updating the description text rather than the kit itself). tools) and countless other technical problems. In the last 24 hours alone, the game has been displaying incorrect text telling players what the rewards will be for the next raid, plus false art telling players the base Red Star orbs are leveling credit 10 times when there is none. When Scopely is selling a product that makes a lot of money for the company, the least players can expect is a high-quality product.
But as players continue to spend money, what incentive does Scopely have to enact the change? The age-old concept of voting with your wallet has never been more relevant to a game like this; My spending has definitely dropped significantly over the past year. I know I can’t be alone in my frustration, as the Marvel Strike Force Reddit page is daily flooded with complaints from fellow players. Scopely has a dedicated, ready-to-spend fanbase, but if the company continues to baffle players, that revenue could dry up. It’s anecdotal at best, but My League has had problems for the past two years filling vacancies due to players getting annoyed with the greed-driven design and dropping out of the game.
On top of that, the updates have consistently omitted many of the quality-of-life improvements that the player base most commonly asks for. The unfriendly RNG heavy red star system has been disliked by many since its inception, while the Real-time Arena mode introduced in 2020 has been deprecated from the community, only increasing the number of Marvel games. Strike Force required by the player. And Marvel Strike Force requires a lot of time and commitment for any purchase you decide to put your money in. Marvel Strike Force respects your time as much as it respects your budget.
With all these installation issues, you might ask me why Marvel Strike Force has been and continues to be my everyday game for so many years. The answer is simple: I still like the core gameplay, character roster, and hero collect/upgrade loop. However, as the problems persisted and the game design focused on annoying players until their downfall became increasingly apparent, my continued dedication became harder to justify. Now, unlike a favorite restaurant that is decreasing in quality while raising prices, I have a tough and somewhat sad choice in the near future. If Scopely and developer Boundless Entertainment continue to further alienate their player base for profit, it is inevitable that my grueling time on this game will turn out to be a low-cost fallacy. than a real love of the game.
