Marvel's Avengers Has Lost Square Enix $48 Million so far

While Take-Two, EA, and other companies have been enjoying some record revenue this year, thanks in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic making binge gaming a lot more popular, not every company has been having a "good" year. Indeed, Square Enix has just revealed that they've actually lost a considerable amount of money this year, thanks to the failure of their long-anticipated but coldly-received Marvel's Avengers game.

While Square Enix's Avenger's game has enjoyed a huge marketing push and some serious polish, the moment people got their hands on it, most people were pretty disappointed. On top of being a paper-thin Destiny and Anthem clone, the specter of microtransactions and paid sponsorships hung over the game like a big, ugly cloud. This was reflected in reviews for the game, and due to that lack of enthusiasm, Square Enix HD has apparently only sold around 60 percent of the total units they had anticipated, which translates to a loss of more than ¥5 billion, or $48 million.

It's important to note that Square Enix HD is just one chunk of Square Enix as a whole, the part of their company responsible for the big, triple-A releases. They have separate departments for their MMORPG offerings, for example, and those parts of the business are doing quite well. So I very much doubt this will translate to anything remotely like a shutdown -- heck, I doubt there will even be layoffs, since laying folks off in Japan is a lot harder to do than it is in the states.

That said, after sinking several hundred million into this game's development and marketing, it seems unlikely they're just going to give up on it entirely. If Bethesda can "fix" Fallout 76, then Square Enix can salvage Marvel's Avengers... but it might be a while before we see it happen.