Update 2: Despite suggestions Marvel Heroes would run until the end of the year, the free-to-play MMO has now been officially shuttered. Developer Gazillion Entertainment has also closed its doors. 

Last week, as reported below, it appeared this news might come sooner than expected—however the game's Twitter account has now confirmed its fate with the following statement: 

To this end, the Marvel Heroes website, Steam page and forums have also been closed down.

Update: 

Massively OP has been told that developer Gazillion will be shuttered entirely, and that instead of running until the end of the year, Marvel Heroes will be ended on November 24—tomorrow. The studio hasn't confirmed the unexpectedly early closure, but multiple Gazillion employees including engineer Andrew Hair and designers Brian Waggoner and Anthony Gallegos have tweeted about their termination. Worse, all three say that staff are being let go without any severance or paid time-off payouts.

Marvel Heroes remains available to play on Steam, but the DLC is now gone.   

Original story:

The free-to-play Diablo-like MMO Marvel Heroes got its "biggest update ever" in January, with an overhaul of all 59 heroes, a new difficulty slider and endgame progression system, and various other tweaks. Following that, in June of this year, a console version was released under the title Marvel Heroes Omega. Sadly for players, it didn't add up to much in the long run, as Marvel has confirmed in an email to Kotaku that the game is being shuttered. 

"We regret to inform our Marvel Heroes fans that we have ended our relationship with Gazillion Entertainment, and that the Marvel Heroes games will be shut down," a rep said. "We would like to sincerely thank the players who joined the Marvel Heroes community, and will provide any further updates as they become available." 

Marvel Heroes has chugged along since its launch in 2013, but apparently not without issues. Multiple sources told Kotaku that there were at least three rounds of layoffs within the first year of release, while a current employee said that he'd been working on updates for the game over the past few months but was "not very confident" that they would ever get released. Gazillion itself has been showing signs of trouble as well, missing several weekly updates, a Halloween event, and the release of Thor: Ragnarok tie-in content.

A date for the actual shutdown hasn't been given. For now, Marvel Heroes remains available to play (and its DLC to buy) on Steam. I've reached out to Gazillion for more information. 

A patch seven months in the making, free-to-play action RPG Marvel Heroes is getting its "biggest update ever" this Thursday, January 19th. First announced last September, the update will overhaul all 59 heroes, as well as tweak its items, replace the current endgame progression system, and introduce a new difficulty slider that lets you increase difficulty for increased reward.

The core of the update is really the changes being made to Marvel Heroes's entire roster of characters all at once. Every hero in the game is being touched in one way or another—some simply being moved over to the new talent tree system (which, in itself, will add ways to modify each hero's abilities) while others might be getting more major revisions to their kit. Developer Gazillion is also using this as an opportunity to revamp older characters with some of the tech they've developed for newer ones, which makes sense as the game nears its fourth birthday.

Gazillion game designer Brian Waggoner told me another one of the main drives behind the hero changes was about removing "false choice," or the illusion that you have options in how to level-up your character when really there's an optimal route that would be a mistake not to use. The new talent system is more about giving each hero different playstyle options, rather than transparent power spikes. 

The game's previous endgame progression, the Omega System, is being scrapped entirely and replaced with the Infinity System, the goal of which is to create a more streamlined, easier to understand way to progress. The Omega System had roughly 170 different upgrade options you could put points into, while the Infinity System has just 30. Once you hit level 60 with any hero you start gathering Infinity Points, which can then be used to improve the stats of specific heroes. Players who still have Omega Points from the old system will see them converted to the new one when it switches over later this week.

Waggoner said Gazillion generally prides itself on very frequent updates, but felt it was important to get all of these changes done at once. Gazillion slowed its usual updates for the last seven months to work on this patch and during that time built new heroes with the changes in mind, so Thursday has been a long time coming for fans of the game. 

Marvel Heroes is available to download free.