Square Enix launched Marvel Avengers as a live service game, with plans to continue building off of the game in the coming years, much like Bungie has done with Destiny or Blizzard’s WoW. Despite having multi-year plans for the game, Marvel Avengers has struggled to stay afloat at launch and is facing a crashing player population to the point that some game features are no longer playable. The highest 24-hour peak for Marvel Avengers was 964 concurrent players on Steam, with the players being drawn from around the world. There have not been any numbers yet for other platforms, but it is unlikely that there will be anything drastically different on the consoles. Square Enix released out a financial report in which Marvel Avengers reported a 6.5 billion Yen loss or 63 million USD. The report stated that the game only sold at 60% of their planned sale quantity, implying that the game had a development budget of over 100 million USD, nearing 200 million when taking marketing and distribution into account on top of the normal development expenditures.
The developer behind the game, Crystal Dynamics, has pushed out a flurry of updates in what seems like an attempt to save the game, although many complaints revolve around the basic gameplay loop which would require a complete overhaul of the game with a restructuring of the foundations, a task that may not be able to be done with just patches and hotfixes alone. Square Enix itself is still in a safe financial situation as Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest has been able to cover the losses experienced with the Marvel Avengers project.
While Square Enix will be continuing on, the possibility of them cutting Marvel Avengers and focusing their efforts on a new project seems extremely likely. Neither Square Enix nor Crystal Dynamics has announced any plans for the game, and are continuing to patch what they can.