Marvel’s Avengers Featured On Cover Of PlayStation Collection

Remember Marvel’s Avengers? Launching right after Infinity War and Endgame, it should have been an easy win for Crystal Dynamics. Instead, we got interchangeable Hulk ribcages and an Iron Man flying at the speed of a paper airplane.

Between the floaty combat, ill-fitting looter shooter elements, aggressive microtransactions, lackluster endgame, repetitive missions, buggy launch, off-brand MCU designs, broken matchmaking, and sluggish traversal, it was hardly surprising when Square Enix finally pulled the plug in 2023 and delisted the game from all digital storefronts. So, it’s a little strange to see it crop back up in a new PlayStation collection.

No, This Doesn’t Mean Marvel’s Avengers Is Coming Back

For context, PlayStation has launched a new collection on the storefront dedicated to Marvel games in celebration of Wolverine’s launch. Included are all the heavy hitters: Marvel’s Spider-Man, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, Lego Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Rivals, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Marvel vs. Capcom, and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. However, as spotted by Reddit user laser16, the collection’s cover also features Marvel’s Avengers, despite it being delisted three years ago.

This was no doubt an oversight, likely by a designer who was tasked with making a collage featuring as many Marvel games as possible, not realizing Avengers was such a catastrophic failure that it had been completely wiped from storefronts. But that hasn’t stopped fans from trying to connect the dots.

In the recent Steam achievement leak, an “Unannounced Marvel’s Avengers” game was uncovered. Combined with the PlayStation collection artwork, some are now convinced that Crystal Dynamics is planning to re-launch the game with the looter shooter elements stripped back to give us a true definitive edition, not just the base game bundled with paid cosmetics.

That is almost certainly not the case. The Avengers game found in the Steam leak was added to the storefront in 2013, with assets confirming it as the canceled THQ project that predates Crystal Dynamics’ work. So, case closed: Marvel’s Avengers isn’t secretly coming back.

But that doesn’t mean Marvel is done with the Avengers. The “Unannounced Marvel’s Avengers” listing was updated as recently as last year, meaning there is still a completely separate Avengers project sitting in Steam’s backend. Whether that’s anything more than leftover metadata remains unclear.

Whatever the case, it’s a nice reminder that while Marvel’s Wolverine might be disappointing critics, it could always be worse.