After producing 25 releases and more than 4,000 cards over the past five years Upper Deck Entertainment has announced the end of its Vs. System CCG for Marvel and DC Comics properties.  In a post on the Upper Deck Entertainment Website lead Vs. System designer Ben Seck bid farewell to the game and to the thousands of fans who Seck counts as “among the most staunch and dedicated that I have known in my twenty years of gaming.”  For the past year Upper Deck has been producing hobby league kits for the Vs. System.  The January kit, which has already been shipped, will be the last one as UDE ends its OP support for the Vs. System.

With the demise of the Vs. System, the fact that WizKids’ HeroClix CMG has not yet found a new home, and the discontinuation of the Marvel board game from FFG, it appears that there are currently no Marvel or DC licensed non-electronic games in the game space.

Although Upper Deck Entertainment’s Director of Marketing Scott Gaeta mentioned several new Vs. System releases when interviewed by ICv2 last April (see “Interview With Upper Deck’s Scott Gaeta”), the handwriting may well have been on the wall with the first series of UDE layoffs announced in May, which included R. Hyrum Savage, the Brand Manager for the Vs. System (see “Layoffs at Upper Deck”). Although the products that Gaeta mentioned, which were in the pipeline, were released, they turned out to be the last Vs. System releases from UDE.

The cancellation of the Vs. System is the latest in a series of retrenchments in the gaming industry in the face of economic conditions that steadily worsened in 2008.  Upper Deck’s May layoffs were followed in June by cuts at Score and Donruss (see “More Game Company Layoffs”).  In November Topps shuttered its WizKids division (see “Topps Shuts Down WizKids”) and Upper Deck announced a second wave of cuts across both its sports and entertainment divisions (see “Upper Deck Lays Off 40”).