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MultiVersus Selling Players Extra Lives Was A 'Bug,' Dev Says

The Warner Bros. crossover fighter let you buy lives with real money

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Harley Quinn holds a bat.
Image: Warner Bros.

In MultiVersus, Warner Bros. crossover fighter, there’s a feature that lets you pay real money to refill your lives during its campaign missions. That sounds scummy, right? Well after fans were rightfully annoyed by it, developer Player First Games has claimed that the feature was a “bug” and not intended as part of the game. You know, the thing they put buttons, text, and associated microtranscations in with? A bug, actually.

Player First put out a statement on the official MultiVersus social media channels laying out some of its planned updates in a future patch. Some of this was pretty standard fare, including performance improvements, an option to turn off team colors that outline characters during team-based matches, and end-of-game stats. The team also plans to reintroduce Iron Giant to the game after taking the character offline when an exploit was found in his kit that let him repeatedly grab his opponent without interruption. But also in that statement, Player First claims the ability to buy lives is a bug that “is not an intended feature in the game.”

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Whatever the truth is, the feature will not be in the game for much longer. But describing it as a bug is pretty bold when it’s clear that some deliberate, intentional work went into making it a feature. Microtransactions with text and buttons don’t just appear out of thin air. Someone has to put those into the game.

While that’s one “bug” squashed, MultiVersus has been met with some serious backlash for plenty of other problems since its re-launch in May. Competitive players have decried the game’s monetization for making it quite costly to host local tournaments, one of its best characters in the beta has become nearly unusable, and it’s hard for people to get better at the game when the online matchmaking pairs you with bots if you lose too much.