Maximilian Dood’s Case Study of Where Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite Went Wrong

We’re just shy of the eight-month anniversary of the release of Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite — a game which, suffice to say, did not quite meet expectations among fans of either Marvel or Capcom, to say nothing of fighting games in general (as evidenced by it’s absence from the fighting game tournaments at EVO 2018, on account of the seeming lack of people playing).

So how did it come to this? Fighting game aficionado and Marvel vs. Capcom fan Maximilian Dood (who had apparently been fed a bit of a line regarding the missing X-Men when the game was shown off at the end of 2016) recently took a long, hard look at where the comic and video game powerhouses went wrong with this newest installment in the hugely popular series:

(Note that there’s just a little Not Safe For Work language within.)

Of course, the big question now becomes “what next?” Updates were promised back in January, but with little in the way of follow-through. That is, until now.

Early on the morning of May 16th, Capcom rolled out a new patch for the game. As luck would have it, as I was going to post the above video, I came across this latest video on Dood’s channel, so I’ll let him take it from here:

In summation: The patches run 10GB on the PC version, 16GB on Xbox One, and 421 megs on the PlayStation 4. Denuvo, the much-maligned Digital Rights Management (DRM) software found in the PC version, has been removed. In addition, things just seem to be loading and running faster all around.

Overall, nothing major, and as Dood notes, it’s probably not an actual good sign for the game itself, at least from the developer/publisher standpoint. As Denuvo needs to be licensed, it seems likely that the game simply wasn’t earning its keep enough to warrant the anti-piracy measures.

And that brings us back to “what’s next?” It’s hard to say at this point, but with E3 just around the corner, maybe we’ll get an inkling of whether Capcom and Marvel have listened to the problems people had with Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite and try to improve on them going forward, or if they’ll just write it off as people no longer being interested.

LBD "Nytetrayn"

David Oxford, or “LBD ‘Nytetrayn’,” as he is sometimes also known, is a freelance writer of many varied interests who resides in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. If you’re interested in hiring him, please drop him a line at david.oxford (at) nyteworks.net.

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