A new YouTuber investigation has shed some light on what happened behind the scenes in MultiVersus.
What We Know Happened
Player First Games launched the open beta for MultiVersus in June 2022, players were immediately drawn in to both the appeal of WB characters from all kinds of properties crossing over, and the game being free-to-play.
It reached incredible player numbers, with 20 million downloading it on Steam, and achieving a peak of 150,000 concurrent players. In June 2023, Player First took it completely offline to prepare for a full launch.
Unfortunately, that launch took nearly a year, on May 2024 on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC. The sentiment around the game cratered in that long wait. The launch was not able to draw similar or higher numbers of players, and the player base consistently kept slipping in the coming weeks.
WB Games shut down MultiVersus last month. They claimed that it cost them $ 100 million, but that was clearly not the full picture.
What Fans Think Happened
There was so much unrest among MultiVersus players that they suddenly started blaming Player First Games’ co-founder Tony Huynh for the game’s failure. Depending on who you talked to, he was either a difficult boss to work for, or a completely toxic personality. Huynh would publicly claim that he and other developers were getting threats and asked fans to calm down.
What An Insider Says Happened
Matt McMuscles made a “What Happened” YouTube video on MultiVersus, citing an internal source in WB Games. Matt found no evidence that Huynh was difficult to work with or was to blame for the issues with the game.
The Real Story Is A Long Story
Matt’s source explains that Player First Games was originally a small studio who expected to start MultiVersus as a very small game, and that they could reasonably manage ramping the game up so that it would eventually have the quality level and content of a AAA.
Unfortunately, because it earned unprecedented player numbers during the beta, WB Games’ expectations also went higher. To paraphrase Matt’s video, Player First Games was now expected to ramp up faster than they planned, and that meant both a higher budget and higher profit goals to deem it a success.
Matt also vouched for Player First Games’ claim that they had to switch from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5. This was because Unreal 4 wasn’t good enough to handle the high player numbers they were getting in beta. In fact, MultiVersus’ comparatively low production values, slow content rollout, and being online only, were all because they originally planned to make a smaller game with a smaller budget.
Matt also revealed that Player First Games was spending some of their budget on licensing the WB characters they were using. This was probably before they were bought by WB Games in July 2024. Unfortunately, WB Games waited over two years to do it. It was just too late to be of any help.
Who Is To Blame?
Ultimately, Matt points the finger at WB Discovery head David Zaslav, for mismanaging the project like he did many others in the company. However, Jason Schreier had earlier claimed that the problems at WB Games were around before Zaslav joined the company.
Schreier says it was actually the head of WB Games at the time, David Haddad, who mismanaged the division after taking over in 2015. Haddad allegedly stifled Monolith Production and WB Games Montreal from making new games. He was also in charge when WB Games produced Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League and Mortal Kombat One.
Zaslav is responsible for Multiversus’ cancellation as the person at the top of the chain. However, he was probably not the person who made the decisions that led to its failure. That includes easy choices like giving Player First the freedom to use their IPs, or buying them much earlier to mitigate risks.
It’s truly unfortunate that a game with so much potential was mishandled to this degree. Since WB Games owns the IP, maybe they can bring it back someday when they’re in a better financial position. But for now, we can only ruminate on post-mortems like these.
You can watch Matt McMuscles’ video below.
