MultiVersus social media comes back to life suggesting relaunch news soon
Eight months after open beta shutdown.
Eight months after Warner Bros.' platform-brawler MultiVersus went dark, following an announcement its open beta would be shutting down until a return sometime in 2024, its social media account has sprung back to live, teasing an update announcement soon.
MultiVersus launched into Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC open beta back in July 2022, and got off to a flying start - ratcheting up over 10m players in the space of a month. However, its player numbers rapidly dwindled and by the time developer Play First Games pulled the game offline last June, its Steam concurrent player count had fallen from a high of 153,000 to just 448.
As to when MultiVersus would be likely to return, that remained vague, with Play First Games only saying it expected servers to come back online sometime in "early 2024". And it's proven to be a particularly controversial period of downtime, not only for its length but because Warner Bros. refused to refund players for any packs, passes, premium currency bundles, or cosmetics they'd purchased across MutliVersus' nearly year-long, multi-season open beta, insisting all purchased items would be usable again once the game returned.
And now, it looks like MultiVersus may finally be preparing to reawaken. As spotted by VGC, the game's long-dormant social media account posted a brief message earlier today, simply reading, "*taps mic* testing, testing, 1, 2, 3". It's not much to go on, admittedly, but it's doubtful Play First Games would risk stoking its already impatient playerbase if it wasn't preparing to announce MultiVersus' imminent return soon.
And despite the dubious handling of its unexpected shutdown, MultiVersus - with its strong roster of fighters, ranging from Bugs Bunny and Batman to Game of Thrones' Arya Stark and Adventure Time's Finn - has already proven to be a pretty good lark. During its open beta, Eurogamer's Christian Donlan was quite excited by the whole thing, writing, "I spent five minutes with MultiVersus over the weekend, which turned into ten minutes and then an hour and then the best part of a morning. MultiVersus is great!".
A return then, could be something worth watching - not least by Warner Bros., given MultiVersus is precisely the kind of free-to-play, micro-transaction-laden video game it's now keen to court following the underperformance of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.