Maybe the Client is Right
Rise of Marvel Rivals
In the faraway time of December 2024, a game that had been teased popped up on steam and it took the world by storm. Marvel Rivals is a game produced by NetEase in a six vs six with a hero-shooter gameplay. It came to an outstanding 279,402.3 average players; reaching 418,832 as its peak players during december. It was released on PC, PS5 and Xbox platforms in a free to play game with the main monetization occurring through battle pass purchase and cosmetics.
The game debuted with 35 (37 as of season one which started in February 2025), playable characters with three different rolls; Vanguard: your tank characters that stay in the frontline of the team or run for the backline of the opposing team. A big health pool and crowd control (CC) are characteristics of this class. Duelists: damage per second (dps) characters whose main objective is dealing as much damage as possible to control the battlefield. Dodges and high damage ultimate abilities are what defines duelists. Lastly, Strategists: their role situates them in the backline healing and providing support to both Vanguards and Duelists. Medium health pools, shields and life persevering ultimates define this class.
One unique twist the game has is “Hero Synergy” or “Team Ups” in which certain pairing of heroes give each other a certain extra ability or a boost. You see some all time favorites from the comics such as “Fastball Special” Wolverine being thrown by The Hulk.
Heroe Time
So where and how do we play? There were 11 maps in the beginning (now expanded to 13) ; these are divided into 9 main maps for competitive and quickplay. The rest are for either practice or arcade mode.The gameplay revolves around two teams of 6 heroes (players) fighting against each other to fulfill an objective. The first type of gameplay is called Convoy in which the attacking team has to push the convoy from point “A” to “B” having certain checkpoints each one increasing the time to push the objective.
Next up, we have Dominitation. It’s a game on smaller maps that focuses on capturing a designated zone as the objective. The two teams fight each other for control of the point and the winning team is decided by two wins. Convergence is the third game type that is allowed in Quickplay and Competitive. In this style one team prevents players from conquering a point and the attacking team takes on the challenge of conquering the first point to move on and conquer the rest of the points.
So what did it teach us if anything?
Oh it did teach us a lot, you see up until the release of Marvel Rivals the hero-shooter genre was dominated. Yes it did have a lot of popular games that made a staple for themselves. You have Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, Valorant, Team Fortress 2. Yet, with all of those heavy hitters one could only think of a game when they thought about the genre: Overwatch. Overwatch came out in 2016 and completely dominated the genre. The release of its second game in the series did come with a backlash due to the lack of meeting certain promises (PvE). It essentially just soft-rebooted the game and more importantly (at least to players) the skins and progress.
Not only did overwatch dominate the field, the newest contender crashed and burnt within two weeks of its release. Concord tried to lift off, but sadly they just couldn’t get anywhere. It lost $400 million dollars and 8 years of development time, promised to be the new IP for PS5 that would ignite their future into live service games. Yet, it didn’t deliver and forced the company to restructure. Sure, many people claim that it was due to the DEI ideologies (it might), but in reality the game was not fun.
So having the field dominated and the newest entry in the genre crash and burn like that was foreboding to say the least. Marvel Rivals was really going to have its work cut out for itself to not only rise above Concord, but survive the obvious comparisons that it was going to get to Overwatch. Somehow it did, not only did it survive the comparisons it overtook Overwatch’s 2 player count in december but easily toppled the number of peak players. According to Steam in December of 2024 Overwatch 2 had 25,291.8 average players and 48,626 peak players. Some people will say that the comparison is not fair due to the “hype” of a brand new game but to this day Marvel Rivals stands at 267,092.5 average players and 496,193 peak player in the last 30 days. Overwatch 2 on the other hand holds 18,904.9 average and 33,426. So by today’s liquid society where the collective focus moves quickly, Overwatch seems to become a memory.
What was the difference?
So we saw the gameplay that NetEase decided to bring to the table with adjustments and new mechanics. We got some numbers to show the difference between Marvel Rivals and other games of the Genre.. Finally we saw that Marvel Rivals is staying relevant in a zeitgeist that moves as fast as a train. What makes it different? Why does it stand out? I believe I can narrow it to three things: MARVEL ,listening and monetization.
The first characteristic that makes it relevant, even to this day, is no secret: the MARVEL IP. MARVEL has stood as one of the long lasting staples of comics, having the most popular superhero in the world: Spiderman. They built up great characters and franchises inside of their editorial: Thor, The Hulk, The X-Men, Avengers etc. All of these were comic book characters loved by all their readers, yet they were mostly for their readers but MARVEL changed the game.
The MCU was their next big step, years of solid character building introducing new and more varied characters eventually took them to the big screen. Granted it didn’t go as expected in the beginning, this all changed with Iron Man (2008) starring Robert Downey JR. Their connected film universe brought a change to the cultural eye and started to accept these heroes as part of the more popular culture. This helped solidify MARVEL into the zeitgeist and in turn made a game that lets you play as your favorite character easily popular.
Even after knowing what the IP represents nowadays to comic book and movie fans alike was not the only reason why it attracted so much love from players. Gamers can be tricky and quite picky about their enjoyment. So listening to them is always a good idea and NetEase did. You see while games that play on the same field broke promises or just outright refused to listen to their players. NetEase knows their market, two separate occasions have shown how well they do.
First,instead of giving people skins for their favorite characters that would be more popular to the masses. They opted to do skins they knew fans would like, the clearest example being: The Maker. An alternate version of Mr. Fantastic that is popular with the readers and beloved by others. The second instance happened not that long ago with rank reset in the competitive format. NetEase originally proposed a drop of four divisions in the second half of the ongoing season. Since their DevTalk 10 and multiple feedback this idea was rolled back to only occur in season change and not halfway through the current one.
Lastly the dreaded monetization, as you may know the trends of monetization have been changing and growing in gaming. From DLC all the way to GACHA mechanics, yet the everyday Gamer has come to hate the idea of being sold the finished versions of game or just outright gambling to add new looks to their character or in some cases even characters. NetEase did the smart thing by making only one aspect of their game monetizable: Customization. You see, unlike other games where you have to complete missions or outright pay to play characters; they opted to let you play all 37 characters for free. The only thing you will pay for is the changing of their looks, want the Deadpool and Wolverine skin? That will cost you money. What if you want to be a free to play player? Then there’s good news for you. The game does offer missions to gain an in-game currency to let you buy from the battle pass and even purchase skins.
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