Like a second bit sidekick tossed aside and forgotten the Marvel Universe MMO has been cancelled by Microsoft.

After months of rumors it simply came down to Microsoft not wanting to pursue investment in the MMO without subscriber and revenue projections on par with the only MMO they qualify as a success, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.

“I’ll confirm. Marvel and we have agreed to end development on the MMO,” Microsoft Game Studios VP Shane Kim told MTV Multiplayer at last week’s DICE Summit in Las Vegas.

“It was an amicable decision…. It’s just something that we felt that, for us and for them, it would be better if we ended development. Which is disappointing, because that had a lot of promise. But sometimes you have to make these decisions.”

Rumors that Marvel Universe had been canned first emerged on 1Up. Shortly after, an industry insider told Next-Gen that plans to release the Marvel superhero-themed MMO had been terminated.

Microsoft had been strangely evasive about the fate of the MMO until now. The rumors originated in November 2007, and in the weeks following, the software maker either insisted that the game was still in development or wouldn’t comment at all.

Kim was hesitant to tell Multiplayer’s Stephen Totilo that something “went wrong” with the development of the game. But Kim did say that Microsoft began development of Marvel Universe with plans to make it a subscription-based MMO. Microsoft eventually found the venture too risky.

“…If you really look at the data there’s basically one [MMO] that’s successful and everything else wouldn’t meet our level or definition of commercial success,” he said. “And then you have to look [and say]: ‘Can we change the business model for that? Is that really viable given how far we are in development? And so forth. Does Marvel want to do that?’ There’s a whole bunch of factors [in canceling the game].”

This is certainly disappointing news to see yet another MMO project aborted early, but a typical decision by a large mega-corporation that doesn’t want to invest resources in a project that’s not guaranteed a very large obscene lottery sized return on investment. If only they could have saved many of us the agony and realize the same thing before releasing Asheron’s Call 2 – years ago before shutting it down.

I’m not the only ones left saying WTF at this decision either.

In any case, yet another super hero MMO that didn’t even appear to have a strong or firm grasp on its gameplay by its developers is probably better off being canned.

So on behalf of MMO gamers, thank you Microsoft for not recognizing that there are MANY successful MMO’s already in this market, you’d probably try to force subscribers to use XBox Live for PC’s to sign-in and play anyway.

Source: Next-Gen