Marvel’s Avengers: The best heroes money can buy

Maybe it was inevitable, but after stumbling pretty hard out of the gate and clearly not quite recovering after a year of release, Marvel’s Avengers has gone back on one of its biggest promises up front, that the only things you would ever be paying for beyond the initial price of the game were cosmetic costumes. There are “hero cards” you can pay to unlock, but you can earn those same perks through gameplay.

Recently debuting on Xbox Gamepass, the game has seen a pretty big boost in activity, but a lot of that got soured on, and rightfully so when Square Enix started selling experience and resource boosters, things that they had previously occasionally just thrown out for free to lure back lapsed players.

This in and of itself might not have been that controversial a move but this comes only months after not only adding “champion” levels that take a lot of time to level up, but slowing down the rate at which you naturally gained XP, to begin with, and now with a power level cap raise on the horizon, which will definitely require plenty of materials that take a lot of grinding to get.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here, Square Enix is a corporation, a fairly big one. Do they care about making money? Duh. Do I think this is “evil and greedy”? Well, maybe just a little greedy but it more just seems extremely short-sighted and incredibly terrible optics that someone didn’t see how this would be perceived by anyone and that it would be worth the controversy for the people who would bother to pay money for these things. Like I cannot imagine the audience for that is huge.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t really played Avengers as of late much beyond completing the “War For Wakanda” expansion, I can’t see picking it up again before Spider-Man comes out, and who knows beyond that, especially if they tweak the resources and/or the experience in an even more unfavorable manor.

At this point, Marvel’s Avengers is a game you can play for free on Xbox Gamepass. And is available on other platforms for $20. I would still say it’s a game very much worth playing for the single-player story content, but the extra stuff Square Enix would really like you to engage with is questionable at best at this point. Also after a fairly long dry period, games are out, games are coming. There’s a lot of competition out there for your time and gaming dollar (including hey a new Marvel superhero team game in just a few weeks) that makes Marvel’s Avengers way less enticing a prospect than it was even just a few months ago. A spot on Gamepass certainly seems like the last chance for it to have that boost it so badly needs, but Square Enix can’t seem to stop shooting themselves in the foot on this one.

That’s all for now, really didn’t expect to go this long between entries but stuff just kept coming up the last couple weeks so expect at least more column in the next couple of days and see ya real soon!