By Evan Pliego
Overwatch had been the number one hero-shooter game seemingly indefinitely since it was released in 2016, nearly defining the hero-shooter title. Hero shooters commonly consist of a six versus six player battle with varying core game modes, oftentimes with 3 character types—Tank, DPS, and Healer—each type having different characters to choose from.
On Dec 6th, 2024, NetEase released a new hero shooter: Marvel Rivals—a well known, simple, yet revisioned and refined 6v6, with 3 character types, a few core game modes, and multiple different characters.
Marvel Rivals became a quick hit with 444,286 players on release and 644,269 upon Season 1’s release, as seen on the Steam player count chart, which does not include the huge PS5 and Xbox player count. That number quickly crushed the 37k player count that Overwatch had on that day, and the similar number the days prior.
As shown by the player count chart, the Overwatch player count has been slowly dropping further and further since the release of Marvel Rivals, all the way to 16,594 players on January 14th. So, what’s the big deal? Why is Marvel Rivals such a huge game all of a sudden? And how has it kept growing its player base?
First off—addressing the obvious—Marvel already has a large fanbase, which is what most people attach the large player base to. Unfortunately, most Marvel games aren’t even enjoyed by Marvel fans.
The last major Marvel game released was called Midnight Suns, which only had a 15k player peak on release. This has steadily declined to the hundreds, where it now sits.
So why does Marvel Rivals have such a high playerbase? A huge problem with Overwatch and most character based games is balancing—adjusting difficulty for fairness.
Oftentimes, people get attached to characters and stick to playing them. Some characters can be considered better or more powerful than others. This causes developers and the game company to “nerf”—downgrade some characters—which creates weird loops of nerfing almost all the characters at least once or twice, only to “buff” or improve characters when they are objectively terrible and unplayable. Usually, the buff is minimal.
This loop often causes many players to drop a game when their favorite character is changed to help “balance” the game.
Another thing that video game developers do is make a character very powerful on purpose, in order to make more money, destroying simple balancing as well.
Marvel Rivals definitely doesn’t seem to like this strategy, so instead they made every character “overpowered.” If every character is insanely good, then they are all balanced. Even Iron Fist—who is argued to be the most powerful, and annoying, character in the game—isn’t that difficult to counter. Only one character is considered to be worse than others: Storm, who has reportedly been buffed the perfect amount to make her more enjoyable to play.
Another major factor in the game’s success is the 33 characters the game started with, leaving plenty of characters for each player with different playstyles.
Marvel Rivals had 12 more characters at launch than Overwatch had at its launch, and yet is still growing its character count. The developers have stated that they plan on adding a new character every 6 or so weeks.
Marvel Rivals is seemingly a hit game, and has surpassed many people’s suspicion that it would only last a month. It has hit all time highs in the hero shooter category, and taken the crown of one of the most popular hero shooters.
Above all, the game is free! There is really no reason not to download the game and give it a try. You’ll find something you like in the game one way or another.
beniciapaw.com 