MultiVersus Dev Calls Out ‘Threats to Harm’ Following Shutdown Announcement: ‘I Am in Deep Mourning for the Game’ – IGN
The game director of MultiVersus has called out “threats to harm” developers on the game have received following the announcement of its impending shutdown.Last week, Player First Games announced that Season 5 of the Warner Bros. brawler would be its last, with the MultiVersus servers going dark this May, just one year after it relaunched. Players will still be able to access all earned and purchased content while offline via the local gameplay mode and training mode.While real-money transactions for MultiVersus are no longer available, fans can still use Gleamium and character tokens to access in-game content until support ends on May 30. MultiVersus will also be delisted from the PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store, Steam, and Epic Games Store at this time.Following the announcement, and without word of a refund policy, MultiVersus players who bought the $100 premium Founder’s Pack hit out at Warner Bros. and Player First Games, with some saying they felt “scammed.” Based on online reports, there are a number of disgruntled customers who have character tokens that are now rendered useless, given they had already unlocked all playable characters in the game. Predictably, MultiVersus is also getting review-bombed on Steam.Tony Huynh, co-founder of Player First Games and game director of MultiVersus, tweeted to address player concerns and call out threats of violence directed at the team.Here’s Huynh’s statement in full:Player First Games community manager and game developer Angelo Rodriguez Jr. took to X/Twitter to defend Huynh, stressing: “Receiving threats of physical harm against him is not and will never be the way.”“I’ve legitimately been losing sleep over the past few days watching as all of these has been happening to Tony,” he said.“The man who would stay up past midnight with us watching streams and listened for fun ideas from the players. The man who took the time to read so many messages and respond to so many people when he didn’t have to. The man who spent countless hours working with every department to try and improve things we could in the weeks we had to do it. The man who went out of his way to hire so many of us from the community and gave us a shot at being involved in something so special. Tony is not who he is being painted out to be.“I know things aren’t the best right now and everyone is looking for answers. Receiving threats of physical harm against him is not and will never be the way.“PFG poured their heart into this game and we still hope everyone enjoys season 5. We never stopped pushing for improvements and again you will see 50 pages worth of them this season. I hope everyone can take the time to read through what Tony has to say, and I hope you will all think things through.”MultiVersus’ demise is the latest high-profile failure for Warner Bros. Games, following Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s disastrous launch last year. Last month, the departure of Warner Bros. Games boss David Haddad was revealed after what had been a troubling 12 months for the company.Parent company Warner Bros. Discovery has said Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s failure contributed to a $200 million hit to its business, and MultiVersus added another $100 million on top. Warner Bros. Games’ only new game release during the third quarter of 2024 was Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, which failed to make an impression.Speaking in a financial call, Warner Bros. Discovery President and CEO David Zaslav said: “We recognise [the games business] is substantially underperforming its potential right now.”Since then, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League post-launch content has come to an end with the delivery of its year one roadmap. Warner Bros. has yet to announce Rocksteady’s next game, but it is reportedly helping out on a director’s cut of Hogwarts Legacy. The legendary British studio has suffered a number of layoffs in recent months.There are also question marks over Mortal Kombat 1’s financial performance, although NetherRealm chief Ed Boon recently announced over five million sales and teased future DLC following the release of the T-1000 Terminator guest character.During the same financial call, Zaslav said Warner Bros. was doubling down on four games: Hogwarts Legacy (a sequel is already in the works), Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, and DC, “in particular Batman.” Warner Bros. recently published the VR game Batman: Arkham Shadow exclusively on the Meta Quest 3, and has a Wonder Woman game in the works at Monolith Productions.”We are focusing our development efforts on those core franchises, with proven studios to improve our success ratio,” Zaslav added.Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
