Friday, December 6th 2024
F2P Hero Shooter Marvel Rivals Shatters Expectations With Over 400,000 Concurrent Players Less Than 24 Hours After Launch
It's no secret that 2024 hasn't been kind to live-service games, with recent months seeing games like XDefiant and Concord shut down—although not always without reason—so it's a bit refreshing to see the recently released Marvel Rivals hit what can only be described as a home run. Not only is the game already at "Mostly Positive" in terms of Steam reviews, the free-to-play hero shooter also managed to draw in massive amounts of players in its first week on Steam. According to SteamDB, Marvel Rivals peaked at 444,286 concurrent players a mere two and a half hours after its launch on Friday, December 6.
The game launched on the same day as Path of Exile 2, which had an equally successful launch, despite its Early Access fee and some serious technical hiccups along the way. These two games have not been the norm, although Marvel Rivals signals that gaming properties based on Marvel characters may have finally found their audience. In previous years, both Marvel's Midnight Suns and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy made their own impacts, scoring big with both reviewers and audiences. Of course, neither of the aforementioned games garnered quite the player count as Marvel Rivals, but that's likely simply due to the free-to-play nature of Rivals.
Marvel Rivals is a free-to-play, team-based PVP hero shooter that puts players into various Marvel heroes and pits them against each other in destructible environments. It's currently available for PC on Steam and on the PS5 and Xbox storefronts.
Source:
SteamDB
The game launched on the same day as Path of Exile 2, which had an equally successful launch, despite its Early Access fee and some serious technical hiccups along the way. These two games have not been the norm, although Marvel Rivals signals that gaming properties based on Marvel characters may have finally found their audience. In previous years, both Marvel's Midnight Suns and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy made their own impacts, scoring big with both reviewers and audiences. Of course, neither of the aforementioned games garnered quite the player count as Marvel Rivals, but that's likely simply due to the free-to-play nature of Rivals.
35 Comments on F2P Hero Shooter Marvel Rivals Shatters Expectations With Over 400,000 Concurrent Players Less Than 24 Hours After Launch
As to all other arguments I'll leave it at that, everyone has their own taste in games, it's fine. Still, has a reason Valorant is way more popular than OW. And no, I don't think "making it watchable esport" was the reason OW went down, the numerous reasons were plainly because of mismanagement of Blizzard towards OW itself, not gameplay mechanics - or people simply moved on from the game, which is also entirely possible.
Yeah, it has some imbalanced characters, but so did Overwatch, and as Overwatch progressed, they gradually nerfed or outright overhauled the gameplay of various characters, before releasing a new hero that was slightly better-than-average for a bit before tuning them back down.
The only issue I have really is that the healer roster is very thin vs the rest, and right now there's no convenient Mercy-esque healer who can at least focus on one teammate to artificially prop them up as long as they're in range to help out an attacker like the Hulk, or no tanky Paladin-esque Healer who is more focused on self healing and slightly healing those near them. I'm sure in due time we'll get such characters, but right now it's heavily biased towards the general-purpose attackers.
People have made comments about Overwatch and this and that.
I'll place this here. There is a lot more going on than what people think.