‘Marvel Rivals’ is an antidote to superhero fatigue and live service skepticism

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NetEase Games and Marvel Entertainment make true believers out of millions while the game rakes in an estimated $136 million in revenue for its creators in its first month alone

Despite some skepticism from players and critics alike, Marvel Rivals continues its triumphant march into 2025. The hero shooter launched early December last year and has generated the kind of excitement that keeps hundreds of thousands of players logging in.

If estimates from Asian games market research group GameLook are correct, Rivals has earned about $136 million in its first month alone. That’s wicked money for a free-to-play title generating revenue solely from in-app purchases.

Marvel Rivals liberally steals from the core of Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch, but not without doing a few things its own way. By opting for a third-person camera view, players can enjoy looking at the cosmetics they acquire. By drawing from a variety of characters across the Marvel portfolio, players can enjoy different playstyles such as the run-and-gun simplicity of The Punisher or the complex melee loop of Spider-Man.

It remains to be seen whether NetEase Games can sustain in interest Marvel Rivals, but just this weekend the launch of the game’s first season pushed up its player numbers even further. “Empire of Eternal Night,” a vampire-themed chapter that plunges Manhattan into darkness while introducing the Fantastic Four to the playable roster makes it feel like this hero shooter has the potential to stick around. 

The degree to which Rivals has people surprised doesn’t come from nowhere. 2024 was a year full of massive disappointments for big publishers making bets in the live service sector. Concord is one of the biggest bruises that PlayStation Studios has taken in recent history, and was refunded and delisted a mere two weeks after launch. Other flops include WB Interactive’s Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League and Ubisoft’s XDefiant.

YouTuber nerdSlayerStudios has a pretty comprehensive overview of Concord‘s death:

What should have also worked against Marvel Rivals, is the corrosion of the Marvel brand over the past few years. Marvel mania inarguably reached its peak with 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, but a string of flops and duds in theaters has created a sense of exhaustion and fatigue. A glut of TV offerings has turned the brand into a kind of background corporate noise, with many thumbing their noise at the thought of more Marvel.

What NetEase has done is invigorate the notion of a Marvel-based videogame. While incredibly faithful to the core of these decade-old characters, Rivals has its own lore. Most of that exists to justify the unlikely alliances and duplicate variants that feature in the game’s skirmishes. More importantly, it gives a fresh context to characters who come from different realities and have different encounters with one another. 

Characters like Spider-Man come from the aforementioned vampire-infested New York, while Black Panther and his sister Shuri are in command of a Wakanda that has expanded its reach into space. And rather than waking up 75 years after his time, Captain America wakes up at the end of the 21st century instead. It all affords Marvel Rivals the opportunity to detach these iconic characters from their comic book baggage and the stigma of any associations with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

At its core, a very good game

None of this would matter if Marvel Rivals wasn’t a good game that’s actually fun to play. As I’ve written elsewhere, it features the famous and not-so-famous heroes and villains doing “very Overwatch things like pushing payloads, capturing zones and opping (overpowering) off huge game-changing ultimate moves with loud battle cries.” It draws liberally from Blizzard Entertainment’s 2016 hero shooter and its 2022 sequel so much, it’s a point of criticism among many. 

But there’s a reputation for many live service games to be fun “in spite of themselves.” Players often find themselves chained to an endless grind for “rewards” whether it be in-game weapons and gear referred to as “loot” or repetitive gameplay and content.

It’s clear to any videogames pundit worth their salt that live service games are difficult to make and demand meaningful support to keep their audiences engaged, to say nothing of the risk that comes with the necessary budget to do both.

As a case study, 2020’s Marvel’s Avengers, the looter brawler from Square Enix serves as a cautionary tale. While many took notice of its single-player campaign and found joy in its meaty combat systems, engagement dropped off thanks to repetitive content and a consistent failure to deliver new content in a timely manner. Not even the free War for Wakanda expansion that was added in 2021 was enough to save the game from being delisted in 2023. 

Marvel Rivals is already taking the right steps to avoid the fate of that game, as well as having the luxury of being able to review the various missteps of Overwatch. That game had gorgeous cinematics and incredibly likable characters but tested the patience of its fans by refusing to deliver on the promise of its peripheral lore. Updates to Overwatch were tuned to Blizzard’s aspirations for a successful esports league, and in doing so diminished the chaotic fun that made it so exhilarating to play.

This isn’t to suggest that Marvel Rivals has an ironclad future, but it does point to other would be live service publishers that they have to do more than just copy-paste what has come before. Not much is going to dissuade them from continuing to make big bets, but hopefully the next ones are made more judiciously and better set up for success. And wouldn’t that be super. – Rappler.com