Marvel’s Midnight Suns creative director explains why the game flopped

Prior to founding Midsummer Studio, a new development team that was announced today, Jake Solomon’s last big credit was working as creative director on Marvel’s Midnight Suns. In an interview with Digital Trends, Solomon gave some frank answers as to why the superhero strategy game got off to a disappointing launch.

Although Marvel’s Midnight Suns card-based strategy gameplay is robust, a stigma around the idea of cards and how different the game was from XCOM 2, one of Solomon’s previous games, existed since before the game was even released. Publisher 2K’s spotty record with microtransactions, as well as a leak that referred to the game as “Marvel XCOM” when that’s not really what the game was, also didn’t help.

“That was tough; it was personal,” Solomon tells Digital Trends during a conversation about the formation of Midsummer Studio. “I remember really being kind of down when that happened because, no, we were not making Marvel XCOM; it was not Marvel XCOM. I hate that phrase is even out there now.”

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There was a perception issue of people looking at the game and not wanting to play it.

Solomon takes full credit for creating and approving cards as a gameplay system and thinks it was a fun gameplay mechanic, but in retrospect, he’s willing to admit that he underestimated how resistant XCOM fans would be to a totally new gameplay idea — and the fact Firaxis wasn’t making XCOM 3.

“The truth is, Midnight Suns is a really interesting game, and I’m very proud of it from a critical standpoint,” Solomon says. “It was very personal for me, but it was one of those things where if I were to look and ask why it underperformed, I would simply say cards. I think cards were a big part of it. We designed a card system, and it was awesome, worked really well, and was