Doomed To Fail At Launch? - The Fall Of Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite 

Do you guys want to see a follow-up video about how MVCI as an esport has persisted in spite of its rough launch year?

i don’t think it’s what “capcom did”... but rather what “marvel did/didn’t allow”

Blame Disney. They tend to ruin ips that weren't originally theirs.

Wow this is an actual esports channel. That talks about all different genres of games and not JUST mobas and shooters like THE SCORE. I’m liking and subbing all these videos from now on.

I always felt bad for Combofiend with the function thing cause I know he was just doing his job more or less, and Capcom couldn’t just up and say Fox/Disney pretty much screw them, but it sure didn’t stop it from being some BS.

Looked horrendous to look at, and it was blatantly obvious that it one one big mcu advertisement and that alone pretty much affected everything that wasn't gameplay

The worst part about mvci? Strip it down to the gameplay mechanics and its FANTASTIC. The game is a blast and has so much depth, but everything around it was such a failure that it could not be appreciated properly. Some things that weren't discussed in this video: 1. DLC announced before the game was released angered a lot of people especially because the main roster was already so scarce. 2. The collectors edition was a complete embarrassment. It came with "infinity stones" that were literally colored eggs. Like ones you fill with candy on Easter. I believe the collectors edition was an extra $60. 3. Capcom failed to advertise/give incentive to attend grand finals of their infinity stone tournament. Watching the top 8 battle it out in an empty hotel banquet hall was super awkward, especially when Cloud was crowned the winner to absolutely 0 applause. I believe capcom did their absolute best considering how good the core gameplay actually was. Disney probably gave this project 0 priority resulting in low budget, low communication, and only wanted a project done by a specific date.

i think my biggest complaint is that they didn't bring the comic book cell-shading from umvc3

as a pokemon fan, the "they're just functions" statement hit differently no thanks to Sword and Shield.

Marvel practically generates a billion dollars a film now, but can't be bothered to give a decent budget for their video games.

People always ask "when's mahvel" but never "how's mahvel" 😔

First Marvel Vs Capcom, now Marvel’s Avengers. Damn Marvel really hasn’t gotten the hang of video games lately.

the whole point of a cross over game is the characters that you love, hands down. wolverine and magneto represents the marvels side and without them, the game has already failed

Marvel vs Capcom : Infinite? more like MCU vs Capcom : Finite

Fox never owned the characters, they just owned the film rights to those characters. Disney still held the rights for most of the characters in games (I think sony still owns the game rights to Spider-Man) so if they wanted to they could have included them in infinite. The reason they chose not to is because they considered using those characters in other media as essentially advertising for fox's films. Same reason they stopped writing fantastic 4 comics.

Never heard of that stone tournament, probably the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one saddened by the constant absence of Juggernaut in the new MvC games.

I like how you go for Max's reaction clips if you need one, pretty reliable source of raw hype. xD

The only good thing to come out of MvCI was that cutscene with Hulk throwing Ryu at a Frenzied Dah'ren Moran while he Shin Shoryuken'd it.

Saw this video just when i started getting into mvci: There is actually a very active , albeit smaller, scene for mvci. people has tried the game when it was on sale, and kind of came out of the stereotypes of the graphics and bad story mode: the majority of the competitive cast cared more about gameplay then the story, and the graphics, while not being great by all means, were slick enough to not become distracting or constantly reminding. regarding the cast, it was a give and take: we got several, new and awesome newcomers such as the aforementioned X, Sigma, Thanos, Nova and others, even though some fan favorite ones didn't make it, especially x-men characters. When regarding the gameplay, it is actually quite good - there are less centralizing characters then umvc3, and the majority of the cast is at least playable. combos can still be long, and the game is still hard, but it does a good job slicking the learning curve for newcomers. The infinity stones, while sometimes being niche, are actually quite an interesting mechanic, as it can affect your playstyle and gameplan orientation more then the characters you choose in some cases. I am not going to say MvCI was an overall great game: it clearly lacked overall as a game, and the budget or effort put into it was definitely smaller than in past entries. However, it's still has a fun gameplay, featuring cool newcomers, interesting mechanics, great online and a secretly active community.

I love how every year a different RU-vid channel makes a video about this subject. I hope we get a new one on 2021.

IT'S MARVEL, BABY!

I never get tired of the retelling of this game's failure. Just glad Capcom didn't try to call it MvC4

For a long time, "functions" was an accepted talking point among fighting game communities, which Combofiend was a part of. This was an especially prominent excuse for the years-old sprites in KoF '94-XI. One good thing to come out of the MvCI failure was showing how unpopular that line of thinking is. Pure technical analysis, and ignoring everything except hit boxes and frame data, has an important place in strategy and development, but art, presentation and characters can never be discounted

Keef was right: BlazBlue wasnt out, it succeeded at first, but now, with the addition of Adachi, who I absolutely wanted, that shit died like MVCI

Man. It feels like EVERYONE wants to make a "Why Marvel VS Capcom Infinite failed" video.

"Boy That's Just Crazy!"

A pretty neat coverage of the history of Marvel vs Capcom Infinite with a decent usage of clips throughout. I knew a lot of the development stuff regarding the game but the interview clips with Brutal Democracy (think that was his name), the hilarious sounding Battle for the Stones tournament and the post-revival of Marvel vs Capcom 3 were all new to me. Fantastic job on this fascinating video!

This game broke my heart.

They wanted it to fail. They knew if it was good enough, we'd all leave SFV'S trash ass.

3:33 dood was soooooooo happy. But little did he know his expectations would run low.😂

how fitting this is posted the day after the MVC3 Lives Twitch Rivals event. It's always mahvel time baybee

I like Marvel but when he said Blazblue Cross Tag Battle I shot out of my seat. Heck forget Cross Tag Battle I never thought I'd ever hear him say Blazblue. I personally would love for a touch upon the Blazblue series. Whether its Cross Tag Battle or Centralfiction. I guess it would have to be BBTag because it's most recent. But damn that or a video on Undernight In-Birth.

If there's the only game you can play, MVCI is solid, that happened in a place I worked at, we asked for UMVC3 but got Infinite instead becuase of a clerical error, since we couldn't bring our own games we settled for Infinite and it was good, but it also felt like learning an useless skill because outside our office's break room, no one played the game.

3:19 bad cut. I caught that!

MVCI: "Welcome to the club" Avengers: "Well, ..."

I don't know why it fail, but I know why you'll succeed. Keep up the great work

2:06 "Capcom". You know this was more Marvel/Disney than Capcom. Capcom would've loved to put X-Men and FF in there and make it look comic book-y rather than promote MCU movies. 6:34 Umm, yeah, no. They were not "owned" by Fox. Marvel ALWAYS had rights to all those characters, they only sold the MOVIE rights to those characters. The only reason for keeping any of those characters out of the game was potentially giving movies not made by Marvel free publicity.

"Swiss cheese swiss cheese swiss cheese", Wolverine (Marvel vs. Capcom 3)

Dead serious, I remember that line. All these characters are just "functions". Holy fuck. When I heard that was their "excuse" for not including X-Men/Fantastic Four/etc, I fucking blew it. I had been following the Disney Marvel scene for some time after the acquisition. I saw what they did to the X-Men in the comics as they tried to replace them, ruin some of the best characters, and basically sent the Fantastic Four behind the shed never to be seen unless they wanted to drive up sales. I saw how they started removing these characters from games and there'd be less and less of them. But this? This was one of the opportunities to put bullshit business aside and give the fans what they want.. Instead, they spat in our faces, and this is what was the result of that. Oh the amount of fanboys who defended this game after the trailers, saying how it wasn't a big deal, etc etc, oh my, yeah, they'd still probably defend this game even now. Personally, I stopped playing many fighting games after it became far too expensive to support. I recently bought SC6 cause' they had a good deal and I got to get back into a franchise I enjoyed in my teens. I can't say the same thing for FighterZ, it's way too expensive, and I never catch sales. Meanwhile Tekken 7 has a complete edition which is a flat price with all content, no bullshit, no confusion, pay one price, get all the content. Other games just don't do that anymore which makes it so difficult for people to even want to get into these games now, especially those who care about cosmetics. Like, you are literally staring at the character you enjoy playing as ALL DAY LONG, ofcourse you should care about cosmetics! Anyway, yeah, this game brought out a lot of bad blood for me, as a long time Marvel fan who has been jaded and apathetic for years, this really did make me feel at least something for a franchise I once I enjoyed. I'll give Ultimate Alliance 3 some credit here, atleast they gave us the characters we wanted via DLC like the Fantastic Four.

My 2 sons & I have been playing MvC (the first one) for awhile now and recently we came across the 3rd one at a local game store, bought it and loved it. Then I found MvCI cheap on the playstation store & bought it for 9.99, thinking I got it for a great price. Played it and we immediately didn't care for it. Even my 4 year old when he saw the roster to MvCI was like "where's Magneto?" The 9.99 I paid then began to feel like I paid too much now. I found the 3rd one again but the ultimate edition & got that for another 9.99 and upon playing it I had this sense of feeling like "ah, this is more like it." I hope we get another version restored to its original glory one day but for now, My kids & I will be on MvC3 Ultimate!!

This was a really fucking great video! It didn’t go as deep as the Wha Happun video from Matt McMuscles but kinda expanded on it while treading some new ground into the MVC community as a whole. It was dope. I wanna give a few thoughts on what happened to MVC:I myself. I feel like there’s 3 huge problems stated here that ultimately killed the game overall; Functions, demo, and release. Now personally I’m a Spider-Man main so it didn’t affect me as much. To hear those characters that people love like Wolverine and Doom not coming back and just being reduced to functions though, it’s like not having Jeffery McWild in Virtua Fighter or E.Honda in Street Fighter. They’re mainstays that have history in the series that people would miss. I don’t know if knowing all their voice lines and stuff is true but they’re endearing to players beyond just their moveset. Combo fiend could’ve easily said “for reasons we can’t discuss (or at this time), we weren’t able to add these characters from this franchise but we’ll announce any plans we have later on”, keeping the door open to adding X-Men and F4 characters later without running Disney or capcom under the bus. There’s also the demo which is just ass. First off, it’s single player. No multiplayer option. FUCKING MARVEL VERSUS CAPCOM 2 ON THE PLAYSTATION THREE HAD A DEMO THAT HAD A VERSUS MODE!!! Secondly, it was story focused that had overly long and awkward cutscenes WITH NO FUCKING EXPLANATION HOW THESE CHARACTERS KNEW EACH OTHER! AND THATS HOW THE FULL RELEASE STORY STARTS!!! (That still makes me mad to think about too). Finally, there was the final demo fight against Ultron Sigma WHICH YOU CANNOT WIN!! Everything about that demo just showcased the fucking WORST about the game while barely giving a chance for the actual gameplay to shine. Sure, you could play as multiple characters but that shit was limited to 90 seconds and it was against brain dead lifeless A.I robots. Especially considering most people who were getting to experience the game at E3 with a VASTLY different demo, this left just about everyone who didn’t have access to E3 with a VASTLY different (and more negative) impression of the game. It was just shit and Disney and Capcom should be ashamed. Finally in my rant was the fucking release which feels like the dumbest shit. Sure, they could’ve had their reason of wanting to have it released for their fiscal year portfolio (or whatever business term shit) or just to make it in time for the holidays except this shit released in September. It had the budget of a single DLC from Street Fighter V. Regardless of their reason, they had all the fucking reason in the world to fund it more and delay it until November or FUCKING HELL, DELAY IT SEVEN FUCKING MONTHS CLOSER TO THE FUCKING MOVIE THIS IS SUPPOSED TO HELP PROMOTE!!! Just so much fucking bollocks and this is one that makes almost zero sense to me. There’s more problems like the story being garbage and shit outside of the game that this and many other videos have gone through but these are my personal top 3 problems that killed this game IMO.

Y'know people always talk about the marvel side of the roster being bad but noone talks about how the Capcom side also felt super gutted. No Tron bonne, no Wesker, Vergil, Akuma Phoenix wright, and the more unique visual characters like Viewtiful joe or Amaterasu either. The villain line up for the capcom side was so gutted the only villain with an actual voice on Capcoms side is Jedah, cool as he is it really shows in the storymode which is 90% fighting drones rather than actual adversaries.

I really find that Max guy super annoying.. his reactions are way ott and seem really staged..

People sure did love complaining about X character not being playable when 80% wouldve left them to rot anyways if they were low tier lol.

*"With many considering MvC2, to be one of the best fighting games of all time"* - * CvS2 fans raise their collective eyebrow *

Matcherino here, ty so much for the shoutout! We're fortunate to be apart of these amazing communities and help support the players! 💪

The hype isn't mvc3, it's in mvc2, this whole video just hides it and doesn't even talk about mvc2.

Even with the wack roster the game actually failed because of the horrendous mechanics. They removed assist so the game pretty boils down to switch spamming lol. They also tried too hard to make switching punishable by making the characters you switched out from stay on the field a little too long so "happy birthdays" happen more frequently.

Just wanted to post Liam Robertson video. Capcom is clearly the ones who basically straved this game of funding giving it less than half the budget of sfv dlc so it's no wonder that this game flop and it deserved to flop. Here's a link to the video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3kanICweLFM.html

Loving how often Akshon uploads

i knew MVCI was doomed when they had no X men chars lol

This game was so fun and it was the MVC game that made me wanna go back and give UMVC3 a try, but all the fun mechanics and sick looking combos couldn’t save this game from a roster that most people considered to be lacking, as well as the bad press that it got from the “characters as functions” comment. I still revisit it for an arcade run with Venom and Spider-man from time to time, only to remember that this game doesn’t even have arcade endings. It’s a damn shame it came out this way. It has good gameplay, it’s just lacking nearly everywhere else.

The match to watch for anyone curious what this game can look like, may I recommend Knives vs Banehallow from combo breaker 2019 (game 3 hits different) This video doesn’t really get into “so how does it play REALLY? And what can you do if you WANT to get into it”

Underrated channel. Quality content. Keep it up!

Damn Cloud took the words out of my mouth

awful looking game, but otherwise great mechanics and one of the most fun to play fighting games

Marvel should just make their own game, they don't need capcom anymore

I knew from the moment they said that there would be equal control and input that Disney was going to control everything and was just going to be a watered down version of UMVC3

I don't care if it's based on MCU the X-Men built this franchise and they got rid of them

This game failed because of art and licensing deals?

2 things i would have added in: 1) that same interview with combofiend, the marvel representative legitimately suggested that people might not remember the x-men, despite the fact that x-men movies have been in theaters for over 15 years and even a few more being released shortly after infinites release. 2) while much of the blame does indeed rightfully goes to marvel/disney, some of it does have to go to capcom because they ultimately agreed to work with them even with all of those restraints. theres no other legitimate reason as to why capcoms side of the roster had to faulter as well because its highly doubtful that an outside company could/would dictate what characters capcoms end

It’s funny. I really enjoying watching your videos covering the history of eSports even though I have no interest in watching eSports and don’t enjoy competitive gaming in general. Well done!

I know marvel had its hand in the jar but capcom not putting in good characters either did not help.

The Stone tournament was interesting, but it should have been a quirky side event with a normal one as the main event.

MVCI fell as soon as they said no X-Men will be present 🤦🏽

The reason due to x men and fantastic 4 characters being excluded was't due to fox owning the rights as fox only owned the movie rights but game rights still belonged to marvel it's just that marvel did't want to essentially give free advertising to fox hence why the x men and fantastic 4 had been absent in so many comics and games

X-men: Children of the Atom to me was the start of it when Akuma was their secret character and got the ball rolling for the franchise.

Thanos, in MvC Infinite: I am...inevitable Vergil, only playable in Ultimate MvC 3: And...I AM THE STORM THAT IS APROOOOOOAAAAAACHIIIIIIIIIIING

I liked because our boi Mighty Kief was in it

Touching to see the MVC community following the steps of the Melee community. Marvel Versus Capcom Infinite is basically the Brawl of Smash. And the 2 communities had the same love for the previous instalment. Tragic that things turned out that way but inspirational for other fighting communities which would suffer from that situation.

Yo thank you so much for this video. UMVC3 is one of the games I played the most growing up and I didn't know about the mod and newer scene. After hearing about it, I may just have to take the plunge.

Capcom : want to create another good MvC Disney : *I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING*

There's this one unique fighting game I want you to look into! It's Mobile Suit Gundam Extreme Versus Maxi Boost ON for PS4! While looking like another typical arena fighter, the game breaks the mold by going for a single screen, 2 on 2 fighting game with over 185 characters to choose from, all of whom are unique from one another. Not to mention this game uses the Gundam IP and has been going on since for 20 years with the release of Mobile Suit Gundam Federation Versus Zeon for Arcades and PS2. The game is considered a staple in game centers in Japan, have a official tournament scene called "PREMIUM DOGFIGHT" and in 2010, won the No. 1 arcade game of Japan at one point. The first Extreme Versus game iteration, in particular, has a Linkin Park song "The Catalyst" as the game's opening song, as they too were Gundam fans. Maxiboost ON is the first Extreme Versus game released worldwide ever since its inception in 2010, but current player numbers are sadly dropping. Rank and casual matches are dead and what remains are casual players new to the game and a rag tag group that is the EXVS Community. They also have their own reddit page! Please look into it @Akshon Esports

They just didnt want me to break the game again. And i was looking foward to footdiving on captain marvel's face

Hey, least Disney didn't PURPOSLY try to kill the game (12:33 Bottom middle)

What annoys me most about MvCI is Marvel still could’ve used the X-Men/FF characters if they wanted, Fox just owned movie rights. :/ If MvC was serious about a comeback, take Smash Ultimate as example, “Everyone’s Here!!” + more characters. Guaranteed best selling Marvel vs Capcom by a long shot! (If they nail art style and gameplay)

You know what's hilarious. Keef was right, BBTag did flop, but at least it made it's mark by gatekeeping MvC:I.

My first thought was “there was a rise????”

It'd be interesting to see you guys make a video about Dissidia NT and how its console/global release flopped super hard when it was considered the most popular game in JP arcades for a good while. Even over the likes of Gundam.

You should cover BBTAG/BBCF History that would be such a cool video

Yeah, the biggest problems with Infinite was the graphics and the roster (I mean, come on, no X-Men? No Phoenix Wright? No other Darkstalkers aside Morrigan and Jedah like Hsien-Ko or Felicia? NO DR.DOOM?!) but the gameplay was pretty neat. Just a big wasted potential.

Capcom PR since the MvCI reveal: "2017 will be a big year for you, promise! Haters will be left behind." (even though it's for SFV) "Characters are just functions." "Your modern Marvel fan, maybe they don't even remember (some) of the X-Men characters." "What's your agenda?" (response to a Twitter post showing the DBFZ booth at an EVO venue with more patrons in line than the MvCI booth) "F*** that game anyway." (after awarding a 2nd place Battle for the Stones trophy to Chris G)

I feel like unless the next MvC game uses the mechanics from MvCI, MvCI will be the 3rd strike of the VS series, because if you think about it, SF3 did what MvCI did in terms of giving legacy functions to new characters and it didn't really sell too well back in the day, but now it's regarded as the pinnacle of fighting game prowess.of course MvCI isn't as complex as 3rd Strike, but the way tag-assist works in MvCI just hits different

I remember I worked at GameStop when this game out when the “Easter egg” controversy was happening with the infinite editions. Those things stayed collecting dust the whole time I worked there

Amazing video!! You should cover more things in the fgc. Maybe make one about guilty gear?

It was essentially a movie tie-in down to the tournament structure, there I saved ya some time

It looks like at this point, MvC is not going to come back so it’s best for Capcom to look at other companies to revive the series. People really love Shonen Jump, so there’s something they can explore. They can also use Namco and Sega characters because of the Project X Zone series. I think whatever franchise they chose, as long as they keep the MvC2 element and incorporate DBFighterz or the newly Guilty Gear Strive graphics, then the capcom cross series can reign supreme once again. The only thing that sucks about all of this is that MvC2 is probably never going to be ported again and I really wanted to play it on my PS5 :(

I think a couple of things should be mentioned. MvCI was doing well in the competitive arena until it was announced that it wasn't going to be at Evo. Tekken 7 and SF5 were the only games getting more numbers than it. After they announced no Evo, numbers dropped dramatically. It really felt like a snub when DBFZ and BBTAG got in Evo when they weren't even out yet. And BBTAG also had a lot of controversy behind it. It's very strange that MvCI didn't get in while KOF14 got in twice even though it looked worse. And the functions thing was taken way out of hand. When you look at MvC2, Sentinel was the most picked character. But when MvC3 came out, no one played him because he wasn't good. Doom became the most popular MvC3 character even though he wasn't popular in MvC2. And you say people practice with the same characters for years and decades doesn't mean much when everything changes between games. Iron Man has been in almost every Marvel game but he plays different in every game. And up until MvCI, Wolverine was the only character who was in every Marvel game. So the rosters change every in game. There's no way some someone could play the same character for the whole series unless they play Wolverine, Chun, and Ryu. But no one ever complained about that. Fighting game players are used to switching characters. The rosters change a lot in most games. Look at the rosters for GG, SF, MvC, MK, and KOF. They change dramatically with each release. Only a few characters actually make it into every entry. MvCI's failure always struck me as weird. It seems like people wanted it to fail from every angle. And in these videos, one major thing I find missing is the actual MvCI community. There is one and they run tournaments. MvCI isn't as dead as people make it out to be. I think it's important to acknowledge them because they have put a lot of work into it and have plenty of hype matches. And we should build them up rather than tearing down the game they play.

You can lay 100% of the blame on Disney. Disney was trying to starve Fox and they didn't give a rat's arse if a game failed because certain character's found on Fox films weren't available.

fanbase saw MVCI and decided they'll do it themselves using MVC3

An incredible video! Reminds me why I love fighting games so much: the community

The gameplay in MVCI was soooo damn good me personally the best gameplay in the seris but the subpar base roster and the graphics is what killed it.. if they make another one they gotta bring back MVCI gameplay the tag system worked so damn well in the game

I thought it's some Capcom PR manager who said that they're just functions, not by a reputable FGC player.

The absence of Wolverine alone hurts me.

Love your stuff just subbed

I hope the Vs series comes back someday, it doesn't even have to be with Marvel. I remember how happy (and confused) I was at the time of Tatsunoko Vs Capcom but I ended up loving that game.

UMVC3 is back at Evo 2023

I wish that Capcom/Marvel will do right by this game/franchise and re release an updated version of this game that fixes all its issues such as the graphics etc. and relaunch it on PS5/Series X with the name: MvCI Phase 2. This game deserves better especially when it has such stellar game play

Protip: Don't take away core aspects of a beloved franchise.