It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost two years since Square Enix announced a huge deal with Marvel to produce video games based on the Avengers license. And it’s even harder to believe that we haven’t seen anything from the project since its announcement, despite several teams working on games.

However, an interesting conversation has sparked over on Resetera suggesting why the company may not have made an announcement. Some people are believing it’s due to the fact that the company has reversed course on a key decision with one of the games’ development, indicating that they’re adding single player.

Now, keep in mind that this is merely speculation from one of the users and nothing official. For all we know, it could be something coming from Disney’s feedback about the game, or maybe even Square Enix reflecting upon the success of the spectacular Marvel’s Spider-Man, in the hope of finding some kind of continuity.

But the Resetera user in question, Nirolak, does bring up some interesting points, as you can see from their summary below:

Back in January 2017, Square Enix announced that they had signed a deal with Marvel to make an Avengers game, and that Crystal Dynamics would be its primary developer. In interviews, Crystal Dynamics implied that they had been working on this for a year or so before announcing the partnership to help hire (which lines up with Rise of the Tomb Raider shipping).

In a very odd turn of events, Crystal Dynamics hires an entirely new set of senior staff, up to and including roles like Creative Director and Game Director, starting between January and March 2018, and continuing through now. I had assumed they had rebooted the game, though it was odd that Marvel and Crystal Dynamics were aggressively asserting that the game had made tremendous progress thus far during these announcements.

Notably, in February 2018, they also added a job for a Senior Producer for a single player mode that sounded like it would oversee the entire process of making a campaign. Most jobs prior to this (and still many today) instead talked about ambitious co-op and online shared gameplay across many modes.

Just today, people were asking who the director of the game was, and when I went to look on LinkedIn, I noticed that The Avengers actually seems to have two full sets of senior staff, one from 2015-2016 (or earlier, if they were studio veterans), and one hired starting in 2018. This even includes multiple Game Directors and Creative Directors.

While not as bulletproof, the people hired in 2018 tend to have work histories more tied to single player gaming, whereas some of the older hires tend to be more online oriented. Mind, this trend does not follow 100% through the staff.

I’m suspicious that Square Enix decided to add a single player campaign in the last 2 years of development (out of 4-5 total) to The Avengers. They expect a gigantic revenue spike next fiscal year (April 2019 - March 2020), so if we assume it’s a Q1 2020 game, that would be 16-24 months after they started making the campaign under this proposed scenario. We did see something similar with Battlefront 2, where EA seemed to move Motive off of Visceral’s game and into making a Battlefront 2 campaign 4-6 months into that game’s two year dev cycle.

This would also all line up with the incongruency of Square Enix’s hiring and their assertions about how far along they are in development, since it would mean they didn’t reboot the game or anything of that nature. They would have simply expanded the scope.

Again, merely speculation, but it has people talking. And it leaves us wondering about something...

After Kingdom Hearts III ships in January, could the company be turning its attention to Avengers for E3 2019, since its only other “big” project outside of that is the still-in-development Final Fantasy VII remake? We might even hear about an announcement sooner, what with Avengers 4 set to arrive in theaters in May.

But here’s hoping we hear something about the Avengers projects sooner rather than later. We’re dying to hear what Square Enix has planned.

You can check out more of the Resetera discussion here.