Some UK and European PlayStation 4 owners recently spotted Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 up for sale digitally despite the game being long delisted. Released in 2009 (just one year into the Marvel Cinematic Universe), the superhero dungeon crawler sequel was developed by Vicarious Visions and published by Activision for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The game was later re-released for PS4 and Xbox One in 2016 as part of Activision securing a brief new licensing deal with the rapidly growing Marvel empire. That deal has likely long since expired, leaving the Marvel Ultimate Alliance franchise to join High Moon Studios' Deadpool and X-Men Origins: Wolverine in the dustbin of gaming history.
Of course, that isn't to say that Marvel is out of video games entirely. It's made new deals on several new titles in the past few years, including a Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 helmed by Team Ninja and published by Nintendo. There's also Square Enix's Marvel's Avengers, which made a big splash on launch and then faded into the background due to numerous looter shooter issues. Most successfully, the comics publisher has worked with Sony and Insomniac Games to create two new open-world Spider-Man games based on a game-specific branch of their multiverse. The second, starring newer Spider-Man protagonist Miles Morales, was one of the shining stars of the recent PlayStation 5 launch.
For what could be a brief moment, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 has rejoined the lineup of available Marvel games, albeit only on PlayStation 4 and only in Europe. First spotted by PlayStation Universe, the game reappeared on the storefront just as quickly as it was delisted in 2018. It's the only Activision Marvel game to appear even though Alliance 2 was released alongside a new version of the first game at the time of the rerelease. That bundle had a global release, so it would be strange for the publisher to go through the legal trouble of relisting the game and then offer it under such a specific set of circumstances.
The more likely scenario is that someone behind the scenes at Sony hit the wrong switch and offered the game for sale once again. Still, it's possible that Activision is preparing to offer the games once more worldwide and that this was just a regional jumping of the gun. That prospect is odd to consider, though considering that it doesn't hold the franchise rights anymore, so the publisher would likely be paying big bucks to do a another re-release. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 sold one million units in six months, but it's exclusive to Switch because Nintendo published it. Perhaps Activision sees that as an opportunity, but it's not clear without more info.
Whether this is a window into a mass rerelease of Activision's Marvel catalog or a brief way for preservationists to grab an obsolete title digitally, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is worth playing at the end of the day. The game trades in some of the complexities of the original release in exchange for fancy combo moves and a story more in line with what was happening in the comics at the time. It tells a more comics accurate Civil War narrative than the MCU's, which could be fun for comics fans. One hopes that the corporations can come together to make this game available once again, and perhaps even optimize it for current Xbox and PlayStation hardware.
Source: PlayStation Universe