David Perry on MUO cancellation: "huh?"

by Chris Chester Feb 14th 2008 at 4:30PM

Filed under: Business models, Interviews, MMO industry, Marvel Universe Online

Eurogamer caught up with David Perry, former Shiny Entertainment big-wig and now localizer of many free MMOs for Acclaim to ask him, among other things, for his reaction to the recent news that Marvel Universe Online has been officially canned. Perry reacted with some surprise, pointing out Marvel is one of the biggest and most prolific mainstream intellectual properties on the market today, with all the money swirling around the box-office success of Spiderman, X-men, The Hulk, etc. He reasoned that if you take a team just as good as Blizzard and set them to work on a Marvel MMO, it'd be even bigger than WoW.

We take Perry's point, but there are a number of factors to consider with this story. First of all, there's a certain danger in developing an MMO for a console environment, especially at this stage in the system's life. The Xbox 360 launched in Fall of 2005, meaning it's probably closing in on the midway point in its life-cycle. In a genre where games like Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot are still making money, being halfway through a five year life cycle doesn't bode well for long-term profitability. And second, whose to say Shane Kim even related the full story? This whole affair could be far messier than we can tell at this juncture -- we may only find out what really happened with time.

Tags: cancellation, dark-age-of-camelot, david-perry, eurogamer, marvel-universe-online, microsoft, muo, shane-kim, shiny, ultima-online, xbox-360