Marvel's Avengers

We picked up Marvel's Avengers on launch day in September 2020, and let me tell you—Crystal Dynamics handed us a live service disaster wrapped in a $200 million AAA budget. The cosmetics-only promise evaporated faster than our coffee supply. We were here for 454 hours straight through that whole mess, watching the community's honeymoon period turn into a full-blown argument about battle passes and gear grind. The narrative campaign was solid when you could actually play it, but the multiplayer live-service model was always fighting against what made the campaigns great. By the end of 2020, we'd documented everything—from the day-one bugs to the cosmetics pricing drama that had viewers seething in chat. It was the year everyone needed entertainment, and we gave them a front-row seat to a live-service reckoning.

Our Marvel's Avengers coverage pulled 250,867 hours watched across those 454 streaming hours, with an average of 517 concurrent viewers and a peak of 1,813. That's respectable depth for a game that promised live-service brilliance and delivered live-service chaos. The followers we gained—2,607 new members—tells you people wanted to witness what was happening. For a single-year game, holding an audience through that kind of launch drama and ongoing disappointment shows the house was invested in seeing where this trainwreck was headed.

Marvel's Avengers became the perfect storm of expectation versus reality. The house watched a legendary superhero franchise stumble in real time. Every patch, every cosmetic controversy, every abandoned roadmap promise—we were there narrating it with the kind of exhausted wisdom only comes from streaming since 2013. The chat turned into a tribunal for live-service games. We documented not just a game, but a cultural moment when the gaming world started seriously questioning whether live-service was sustainable for single-player IP.