Warner Brothers’ live-service platform fighter “MultiVersus” is ending its online service on May 30. It was announced in a post on X, as well as on a blog post on the game’s official website.
Released May 28 2024 and developed by Player First Games and published by Warner Bros. Games, “MultiVersus” is a platform-fighter similar in gameplay to that of the Smash Bros. series of games with a roster of over 30 unique characters.
The game features a wide cast of characters from across Warner Bros’ many franchises, including characters from “Looney Tunes,” the Batman” franchise, “Adventure Time,” “Scooby Doo” and more that battle it out on the game’s variety of stages, based on the many fantastic worlds these characters hail from.
On the planned shutdown date, the game will go offline for the foreseeable future, and will be delisted from all digital storefronts, prohibiting any players from downloading the game in the future.
For those who owned the game before the shutdown, a local save file will be created on the account the game was owned on, allowing for offline functionality and gameplay with AI or with up to three players.
As of this moment, there has been no given reason as to why the game is being taken offline. The blog post on the game’s website states that “this decision was not made lightly” and that they “are incredibly thankful for the support of the MultiVersus community throughout this journey.”
This news is shocking and disappointing to many, as the full version of the game had launched barely a year prior to the shutdown announcement.
This was after the game’s open beta was taken offline on June 25, 2023, to make significant gameplay changes in hopes of having the completed vision of the game on release.
These included changes such as balancing characters’ strengths and weaknesses to better fit the current competitive state of the game, general engine updates to make the game run smoother and prevent less crashing, more accurate hit registration on attacks and slowing down the game’s speed.
The news of the game’s shutdown was released the same day as a trailer for the game’s fifth and final season of additional content. This season would add Aquaman and Lola Bunny as new characters.
Because of the announcement of the game’s shutdown, all content new to this season would be completely earnable through time spent playing the game alone, not through microtransactions.
Microtransactions are purchases of digital currency or items within games, with the main purpose of speeding up game progression. Since the time of the announcement, all future microtransactions within the game are unable to be purchased.
This means that players can no longer purchase additional Gleamium, the game’s premium digital currency, to purchase items such as character skins or other items from the game’s shop. Fortunately, players can still use Gleamium that they’ve obtained and saved in their accounts, and those purchases can still be redeemed.
Multiversus was a game with great potential but was eventually forgotten over time despite having decent gameplay and a steady number of characters. It’s a shame to see a game that could have had such a bright future wither away and be left to rot a year after it’s released.
