Gazillion was of course the company that developed and published Marvel Heroes Online.
WARNING: Rant up ahead….
This first part of the article is nearly the same bullshit Hartsman relayed to VentureBeat when they mentioned their bringing Devilian to the west (that was part of the deal that Trion sold to Bluehole Ginno in terms of putting their backend expertise in publishing MMO’s behind the game in order to market it to a global audience. And these f*ckers failed miserably managing that game including downsizing the team just half-an-year in.
To date, not one single worthless MMO news site ever bothered asking either Bluehole and Trion what exactly went wrong (since both share in the blame). And they spun their publishing (and helping to drive it into the ground) of Devilian as a positive in that it helped them (the company formerly known as Bluehole Ginno) with running PUBG in the process…. give me a goddamn break.
And Trion now wants to sell this same bullshit to other developers AND to former players/customers like myself who have sworn off touching ANYTHING from Trion ever again. Sorry, but anything that ends up being developed and published by them is something I am not going to touch. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Gazillion didn’t have any notable advanced infrastructure. And while they have the code for an isometric MMO (which they’ll need to reskin and redo game systems for), I am definitely not going to touch it. Trion Worlds for me is damaged goods (thanks but no thanks).
UPDATE: There have been various speculation going around that Trion would be attempting to design either a replacement for Devilian or trying to revive Marvel Heroes. The latter would require re-obtaining a license from Disney; I don’t know how viable that it at this time. The former is NOT going to happen since it would require licensing those assets from Bluehole and well, their prior partnership resulted in a now dead game. Trion will likely create their own IP if they fail to find another established franchise that would be willing to partner with the company.
UPDATE 2: David Brevik (creator of Marvel Heroes and later the CEO of Gazillion) has been asked multiple times about the possibility of someone acquiring some of Gazillion’s assets (including the Marvel Heroes engine) and he has mentioned something to the effect that whomever does that would need to hire some of the engineers who worked on the game…. which makes sense because of all of the “quick and dirty” hacks that coders tend to do when addressing issues. It’s always notoriously difficult to take someone elses existing code, and trying to further develop it. So unless a lot of that code is well documented, it may not just be a simple re-skin to create some other isometric MMO (and based on what Brevik mentioned, Trion will need to court some of those folks).
