Marvel Rivals is a reckoning 20 million players in under two weeks that is insane what is going on it's light it's fun it's flashy it has some of the best character designs I have ever seen in any Marvel property period and on top of that it has a battle pass that doesn't expire thank you thank you thank you so much for this lesson that you are teaching to the industry because they need to learn it and that's exactly what this game is doing right now because this entire en year we have heard the same line
of garbage toad across the entire industry as to why live service games have been failing it's not the character designs the people who are talking about that are toxic it's not that we don't understand what the players want is that there's too much competition in the industry right now it's not the game play it's because people just aren't you know interested in hero Shooters anymore really is that what it looks like to you all of this back and forth while figting ignorance and we've had some incredible games this year we've had some incredibly popular games
this year but we haven't had that game that stood as definitive proof as to what the players have been asking for for a long time we haven't had that you know 20 million players in under two weeks kind of proof and that's exactly what Marvel Rivals is it's a very fun game and that's the main reason why people are playing it it came out of left field for me I'm actually a bit shocked to see actually I'm not that shocked to see how popular the game is because after playing it you can see why everybody's
playing it right now but I think that this game stands as a lesson for the rest of the industry and I think in a lot of ways the people that were talking about live service games this year and why they were failing they might need to go into hiding after this one so you could use today's sponsor delete me so let's talk about something really important your personal privacy if you've ever Googled yourself like I have you know how much of your personal data is out there phone numbers home addresses even information about your family
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down within the same year that they were released one now stands as the Crown King of 2024 the list of excuses is grown incredibly long the players are sick of being ignored and in many ways for those players who have been mistreated by other games Studios and Publishers and subsequently lost interest and hope in those games Marvel Rivals stands as their new Refuge right at the end of the year in the same week as the release of Path of Exile 2's Early Access the game climbed to 480,000 concurrent players on Steam while pulling similar numbers
across PlayStation and Xbox the developer announced in just under 3 days that the game had reached 10 million players just over a week later they would update that number to 20 million players regardless of it being free to- playay or having the Marvel IP while those are definitely factors here we've seen plenty of games especially live service games fail to Garner any level of success however Marvel Rivals seems to have something that everyone else is missing now I've been busy with other content and other games however whenever I get the chance to I've been logging
in and playing with friends this game feels incredible to play and that's something to take note of that is incredibly important here especially in this genre there are very few performance issues the controls feel fantastic every character feels enti distinct from the other we aren't beating the accusations here as the great and wise Mike yabara so brazenly pointed out on Twitter and then later was shamed into deleting the comment Marvel Rivals is essentially OverWatch but there is a lot more here than just a Fresh coat of paint Marvel Rivals is a live service competitive multiplayer
game developed by netes offering players the opportunity to fight in an OverWatch Style game using iconic Marvel superheroes and villains this game is the quintessential hero shooter offering a roster of beloved characters including the likes of Spider-Man Magneto storm Iron Man Captain America and more what really sets Marvel Rivals apart from many of the other live service games is its commitment to staying true to that Marvel Brand offering a staggering 33 Heroes at launch all with abilities and skills that genuinely suit that character combined with arguably some of the best character designs in all of
Marvel I think that's where Suicide Squad kills the Justice League really went wrong they didn't stay on brand they forced the characters and the setting into a looter shooter mold for profit purposes none of the characters really used any of their trademark abilities and everyone used generic weapons and guns to fuel that looter shooter formula in Marvel Rivals you are playing as those Heroes fulfilling roles that they are best suited for and using abilities that make sense for that character what's really interesting with Marvel Rivals and this is pretty much across the board is there
is a much higher skill ceiling due to the depth of mechanics between each characters and how they synergize together characters in the game have unique team up of abilities passive bonuses and activated abilities that can only be unlocked when you're actually pairing them with specific allies for example if you use Adam Warlock with mantis or Star-Lord well he'll Grant both of them a free revive upon death this is something that I think really adds a little bit of extra flavor that this genre has been missing that depth and flexibility doesn't just end with team ups
you see it across the individual skills of the heroes themselves in OverWatch as an example Lucio can Pump It Up boost speed and healing and he can knock enemies back and honestly that's about it his close closest comparison in Marvel Rivals Luna snow can use Precision to heal her allies deal damage she can give out Shields she can deal bonus damage with ice shards and slow enemies down she can Empower her abilities to pierce through enemies and allies and she has an ultimate that can either heal or increase damage there's a lot more in the
way of skill expression and rooll flexibility across the entire game now what that means in gameplay is that while Marvel Rivals is a bit less accessible than OverWatch is it has a higher barrier to entry for competitive play due to the depth of the character roster and their abilities but a meta is much harder to pin down in a game like this there is a lot more in the way of individual skill expression between each character and by extension every match feels much more fresh because not every player plays the same hero the same way
I spent most of my time playing as psylock I love this character I love her in the Marvel Universe I absolutely love her design in this game and she's incredibly fun in Marvel Rivals I think that in many ways this game's biggest strength isn't about how characters fulfill their roles it's about how the game provides this layer of player agency that I otherwise don't feel like I get in other games I'm not a frontliner I don't really like being in the mix I like sneaking around peppering enemies with a bit of damage from the sidelines
to support other characters I ignore the objectives and catch players who freshly respawn that are trying to get back to their team and then I'll drop in out of nowhere with an ultimate to take out a bunch of enemies and disrupt the point and then fade back into the Shadows I want everyone to forget that I'm even there until it's too late Marvel Rivals has the vision to allow players to be able to play their own role rather than the one that the game assigns to them the minute that this game came out I started
getting Discord notifications I got messages from friends have you heard about the game are you going to play the game do you know anybody else that's playing the game and that is incredibly special for a game like this because that's exactly what the developer wants and that's exactly what a community wants for this kind of game because you want more people that are playing it you want people to go out and try to find more people to play the game with and it just goes to show just how popular this game has become in such
a short amount of time and I think it's going to continue to grow in popularity because it is a really fun game and a lot of people are really liking it right now and in a lot of ways it reminds me of the launch of the original OverWatch and not just because of all the images people have been sharing online what is up with people's obsession with wanting to put a big you know I'm just not even going to touch that one it feels like you're eating popcorn just one more just one more and the
next thing you know hours have gone by you've been swapping between these different matches is where it's chaotic and people are still trying to learn how to play the game everybody's kind of out for themselves and then you drop into a match that almost feels surgical where everybody understands their role they know what they need to do they understand the maps and it just feels great to play and I think if there was one thing that I had to point out and say like this is Marvel rival's biggest strength and it's even bigger than the
Marvel rival Marvel IP itself and it's just that the game feels really good to play and that's something that I think a lot of Studios have gotten wrong over the last couple of years there's no registration problems there's no net code issues there's no disconnects I haven't had any problems with FPS or anything like that the menus are really easy to navigate the UI is super clean the I don't have any problem with being able to tell allies from enemies in the game I can't tell you how many times I've ran into games like that
and yeah it just feels really good to play the animations are solid the controls feel really good the character abilities make sense and look really cool but nothing ever really you know obfuscates your vision while you're playing the game which is really important in a game like this and that's something that they get right and I think that goes a really long way with something like this and one of the other things that I like as well is that they're not going to pay wall characters behind battle passes or microtransactions they're just keeping it cosmetic
it's the best way for you to be able to do it with a game like this and something that I really like is that you actually have to go looking for the monetization it's not just in your face and I'm going to trigger some people when I bring this up but you know those games that like to hit you with like four or five different notifications or menus of like different things that they're trying to sell you before you can even get in to play the game in the first place Marvel Rivals does not have
that open the game press play you're in a match simple as that and by the way incredibly quick match times I mean you hit it and it's just like match found there's no delay or anything like that it's great I love it and you know in a lot of ways when I'm looking at this game I think that I look at the industry and I see how they've been covering it talk talking about its success and the reviews and things like that and they're really downplaying it they're oversimplifying it well it's the Marvel IP well
it's a free-to-play game that's the reason why this game is doing so well and they're really underselling it because I think the truth is a lot more nuanced than that Marvel Rivals doesn't just replicate what others have done right it also does better what others did wrong and in that what they're doing is is they're picking up all the players that have been left behind a really popular discussion that I've seen recently is both games executives and games media that have been writing this line of games being ripoffs of successful games and that's the major
factor as to why those games have been able to find any success which yeah duh but at the exact same time there's more to it than that and that undermines the success of that game we saw the same thing with poor on its release its design and gameplay elements were definitely emulating Pokemon there's no doubt about that but a mere copy doesn't find 25 million players the way that PO world did or now 20 million players for Marvel Rivals and its inspiration that's taken from OverWatch now I will say I find it incredibly Rich to
see that Mike Yara ex blizzard president turned sports betting CEO now there's a career change that makes a lot of sense it tells you a lot about the industry today now doesn't it however he went to Twitter to say looks like OverWatch Marvel Rivals ships tomorrow much like light of mreo a clear copy of horizon zero Dawn out of China I mean even the character name Widow maker in OverWatch versus Black Widow in Marvel Rivals LOL net ease 10 cent all the same ironic coming from somebody that used to work for blizzard a company that
outside of a few hits has built its entire Empire off of copying successful games modernizing them and then re-releasing them to even more success I mean OverWatch isn't even original most of its core mechanics and premise were directly taken from Team Fortress 2 but I've seen a lot of people comment on this tweet however the one thing that I see that apparently nobody else does is fear and coping if po world ever beats the sales of a Pokemon release if Marvel Rivals buries OverWatch if light of matrium out sells Horizon what does that say about
the empires that you've built and the games that you've made if somebody can simply walk up take what you've done make it more fun more edgy more sexy or whatever and then immediately find success aren't you the one that's failing to meet your customers needs OverWatch was massive when it first released and it held that popularity for a long time however blizzard over the years squandered all of the Goodwill that they had created with that game they killed their competitive scene by getting rid of the OverWatch League they erased the original game when making OverWatch
2 effectively bricking physical copies just because they wanted to push people into a new microtransaction ecosystem for many that was the breaking point the players that remained behind did so because they actually believed in the promises that blizzard had made for OverWatch 2 the PVE mode the added depth the value that was supposed to come with all of these great sacrifices that they forced upon the player but in the end all of that was taken away all the future plans and Promises were cancelled what they were left with was a stagnant live service game that
was no better than the original version that barely even changed and had only taken their money and their hope there's no loyalty there anymore so when we see a new game like Marvel Rivals step out onto the scene it has a ton of recognizable characters more depth and a Clear Vision of the future well it's easy to see why players would go to play that game I mean blizzard is practically forcing them to at this point that's why I always thought it was odd when I would see how often games media would talk about why
Sony's Concord failed claiming that it had to do with the fact that the hero shooter genre just wasn't in style anymore it had nothing to do with that in fact I would like to believe that there's probably a growing hunger out there for something to replace OverWatch because there are so few experiences like that in the market right now there are so few low commitment fun games that have great multiplayer experiences with low bars of entry and high ceilings for competitive play that's why OverWatch succeeded for so long it stayed true the entire time Marvel
Rivals is finding success because that need is still there in the market Concord didn't fail because of the genre it failed because it lacked the one thing that Marvel Rivals has in abundance character in an interview with Euro gamer thus Sasser the director of Marvel Rivals said that Concord didn't bring any unique value and that's the reason why it failed saying that the truth is I don't think anybody can predict this or the games industry would be radically different today there are a lot of games that come out that people are like it's going to
do well and it flops or people are like it's going to flop and then it succeeds amazingly I think it's really hard to tell ahead of time and you're always worried about that the trick is you have to have that reason that people want to come play your game I think that Marvel Rivals does that exactly with superheroes I don't know about you but when I heard about the game's concept I was like oh my God I want to go be storm in the game I want to go be Doctor Strange In the game I
want to be those heroes in the game that sounds awesome and of course my mind immediately Le to all the cool possibilities that you could have with that and that's what I think will pull people in and I think he's right heck I don't even remember any of the names of the characters from Concord and I don't think anybody will Concord really didn't do anything it had these characters that weren't all that well-designed people didn't really want to play as them or even get to know them and the developers just assumed that we would want
to get to know them we know that because they had this whole plan and business strategy around delivering seasonal movies for their cast of characters you either have to hook play players with something that they know or you have to tantalize them with something that is so cool that they need to know more about it Concord did neither of those things while also looking not really all that entertaining to play you know another justification that I'm seeing right now as well is that the reason why Marvel Rivals is doing so well is because it's free
to play and then they make the comparison and say well you know the reason why Concord failed was because it was $40 it would have done better if it was free to play I don't think that that's as big of an impact as many in games Media or even the industry thinks it is from my perspective when you make a game free to play You're essentially just removing the ceiling on what kind of success a game can have because you can basically reach any audience anywhere at any economic status but at the end of the
day if a game is good enough or interesting enough or it's a game that players just genuinely want to play they will buy that game I mean Call of Duty still sells Gang Busters uh OverWatch wasn't freeo play when it first came out and it still did really well and it stayed popular for a really long time I just don't think it's as big of a Factor as people make it out to be people will buy the games we've seen that all year round the most successful games this year were games that were sold not
necessarily games that were free to play look at black myth Wukong look at uh balers Gate 3 last year look at Elden ring look at Elden ring shadow of the UR Trey there are tons of examples of games that sold just fine and really weren't limited by the fact that people had to pay for them you know it's actually crazy is that I can't remember exactly what video this is from I'd almost guarantee it's from a wakeup call but I talked about how none of these live service games none of these Publishers are out there
creating any Goodwill With Their audience all they're doing is creating a scenario in which players are ready to be taken away from them at any given moment because all they do is take they just take take take take take it's always a net negative for the players and a net positive for them because they keep making money and because of that you're not building any loyalty and that's why I think a game like this is succeeding is because in a lot of cases it's just playing players that have been burned by other games that have
been waiting for something else and this is the shiny new toy and it looks really fun and cool and it's recognizable and that's why players are going to play it and what's crazy is is that any company could build loyalty they could actually hold on to their player base I think a really good example of this is Path of Exile and Warframe years of customer satisfaction and those players are stuck to those games they're not going anywhere every single time they do an update bam player numbers shoot up Path of Exile just released Path of
Exile too game blows up over half a million players on Steam who knows how many players across other platforms blizzard could have done that but they didn't they instead wanted to milk their players for all their worth and while I don't think we're going to see you know a massive impact in the player base of OverWatch immediately we probably will see it over time because keep in mind those players are invested over there they have skins they've been playing the game they understand the game they know the meta you know the people that are in
the competitive scene you know they're invested for other reasons as well so you're not going to see a lot of those people move immediately but I do think you're going to see it slowly happen over time because one game has a bright future and the other game is just yeah I don't know I think that Marvel Rivals director is absolutely right when he's talking about creating something to entice players to come over to your games and for him he's using the example of the characters which he's absolutely right in that I think that you know
having the IP is huge it's very recognizable people want to go play as the Marvel characters I have my my favorite most people have their favorite characters it's fun to play them that you know as those characters and it's also fun to fill that you know player fantasy or that power fantasy of playing as that character and using their powers against other Heroes and stuff like that but one thing that I think that Marvel Rivals has proved that the industry is not going to be very happy with and it's that players do care about how
their characters look something that I've taken a while to figure out how to properly voice is that games across the board need to do a better job at inviting players in to actually play their games and making your game beautiful and attractive is the best way to do this now I mean this figuratively and literally Dark Souls or Elden ring don't need hot characters to bring you in it hooks you with the setting the vistas the brutality Path of Exile too entices you with the grotesque nature of its World however games that the player character
is the main focus narrative driven RPGs or in this case the hero shooter genre it is incredibly important to make sure that those characters are going to attract the player in to actually want to play as those characters to learn about them to be them and ultimately buy Cosmetics for them Marvel Rivals understands this and executes on it with style before this game was even released I cannot tell you guys how many times I saw images of Squirrel Girl floating around Twitter Reddit and Discord conversations hell the first time that I was even introduced to
this game was because of a tweet that I had seen where Apparently one of the models that posed for one of the characters and their CGI had been leaked and the body model for psylock proudly let everybody know that that was her ass in the video game Rivals has some of the slickest designs that I have seen in this year so far they do an insane job of blending comic designs and Anime designs in a way that doesn't take away from the original art of the characters they still remain just as iconic but they're updated
for more modern sensibilities and tastes you want to play as these characters and the game invites you to do that because of how great they look when you actually play the game it's even better you're bouncing between these menus and flashing yellow lightning characters popping out of the selection screens they have these awesome intro animations and in game the art style flows between this handdrawn cartoon and cell shaded thing that feels like it's straight out of the spiderverse movies which were really incredibly popular and Visually beautiful when I go back and I look at games
like Concord or Suicide Squad kills the Justice League it's clear that character designs play a huge role in drawing players in yet these games missed the mark in Suicide Squad kills the Justice League for example they gave their rendition of Miss freeze and that felt completely detached from the character that we know and love when you look across all of the characters and Rivals every single design jumps out of the screen showing you something fresh interesting and recognizable and I think the same thing can be said for Concord where the characters just felt completely forgettable
they didn't inspire curios it the designs felt so generic that there really wasn't even a reason for you to care there was nothing about the game that screamed come and play nothing to make you want to learn about their backstory or even experience the game play and I think it's really important to take notice that Marvel Rivals has completely avoided this broader Trend that we've seen across the industry this heavy lean into socially Progressive design choices that I'll be honest I just don't find them aesthetically pleasing nothing to do with personal beliefs or ideologies I
just don't think they look interesting or cool often times they feel forced and uninspired characters that are introduced with seemingly little depth lacking substance and designs that are so clinical and uninspired that they fail to generate any excitement or interest instead they're just turning players away I've seen a lot of people ask the question why do you even care if you don't like the way that it looks just don't play it and that's the thing people are not playing these games they are failing by either creative choices or choices that are rooted in their own
worldview I want games to succeed I want games to do well I don't want developers to lose their jobs or Studios to go out of business I want more games to play and the only way for that to happen is for more Studios and Publishers to Face Reality balers Gate 3 in laran studios director of publishing Michael da stated this perfectly he said 2025 and Beyond is going to be an extremely tough time to ship a game with division spilling into everything I have one practical piece of advice that to some seem controversial but it's
crucial anticipate don't ignore or ridicule or stoke figure it out navigate the waters even if you think they're unfair or that the sea shouldn't be that rough the reality is that it is and he's absolutely right that's just the reality of the world ultimately when a game fails to deliver on its foundational elements strong engaging characters and designs that invite players to connect everything else becomes irrelevant players need to feel drawn into these games world and they need to be invited in before they can even get to the game play while many may wish that
the world was different and they want to project their worldview onto their game and their characters you are selling a commercial product that people are expected to buy for you to stay in business and if they don't like the way that it looks they're not going to play it now I want to be crystal clear on this because this is social media people can and will frequently take you out of context and completely miss the plot when it comes to these conversations so I'm going to be literal as possible looks alone will not and cannot
bring you continued success they can Garner attention but Clarity eventually will take over and interest will be lost if there's nothing else there beyond the looks a perfect example of this is the first descendant this game has some of the hottest character designs that you can find in gaming without having to private your steam Library many people celebrated the release of the first descendant it soared up to 260,000 players on Steam within the first week of its launch it was well-received on console and it quickly became the flag toly in the face of developers that
were creating games for the mythical modern audience and the journalist that defended them I played the first descendant I reviewed it on this channel and while I felt it controlled well it was one of the most shallow games that I've ever played it was repetitive it lacked diversity in gameplay in content and its progression and monetization was completely taken from Warframe but they had gotten rid of all the fairness and generosity overall the game just had no soul and to nobody's surprise the game Lost 94% of its player base since launch and the truth of
the matter is you need to have more than that and I think that Marvel Rivals is likely going to be that proof of concept it is shown that success in Live service or any game for that matter is about making a game that resonates it's about the combination of all factors that make a game successful Marvel Rivals performs well it's smooth to play it has accessible gameplay that feels familiar yet fresh it has a a lot of depth it has a high ceiling for skill expression it has some stunning artwork and character designs and most
importantly it's a game that understands what players want respects it and delivers it and it's just a fun game at the end of the day that's exactly what we need these games to be it's the most important thing is for these games to be fun and enjoyable and that's exactly what Marvel Rivals is it's very light it doesn't feel high commitment or anything like that I love the character designs I love the animations of the game I just like playing the game just fun to play and that's what you want from a game like this
you know I've seen a lot of the reviews for this game talk about how it's just a Messier version of OverWatch and while I think that's true in some cases because there's so many characters and they have so many abilities and there's the synergies and the team ups and stuff like that at the same time that's kind of the charm of the game that's why the game is so much fun is because of the chaos it's one of those things where it's actually more difficult to describe and it's better off experience so I highly recommend
if you guys like these kind of games go give it a shot I think it's really cool Plus on top of that I just like to see games like this succeed in the first place because I think they do show off a really good example of what players are looking for in games today and it gives a better through line for other developers to emulate that success and yeah Follow the Leader in this case and you know to be honest with you this game came out of left field for me I was not expecting this
game and I keep doing this to myself I had written this game off entirely because I saw it was made by netes and I am one of those people that used to have a bias towards a lot of Chinese game developers because I was always seeing the same kind of games coming out from them usually just blatant cash grabs gotcha games things like that and it's just not for me I like things that value my time and money and oftentimes the games that were coming out of there were games that didn't do that and I
had written off once human I was proven wrong I was I written off blacksmith Wukong I was proven wrong I wrote off 12 arrivals and here I am again proven wrong so I am just GNA you know not my uh not not sell sell myself up River when it comes to some of these games anymore but you know it's crazy to see like what is going on with China genuinely I I'm wondering if it's just because of the fact that they're not dialing into like the social politics and like social Progressive nature of like just
you know General discourse in the West and stuff like that that they just cut through all the BS and see like what consumers want to buy as a product and just make that product and they ignore everything else and I'm that's probably why they're finding so much success right now is because they're basically just ignoring all of the noise of the world and just making a video game as a video game and not really thinking about anything else and it goes a long way it's giving them and bringing them a lot of success and I
think that the crazy thing is like the east in general has cleaned up 2024 2025 is probably going to be just the exact same thing because if you looked at the game awards a lot of the biggest releases were games that were coming from the East capcom's cooking you got a couple of the other Chinese developers that are cooking right now you got some you know some South Korean developers are starting to cook a little bit they just need to get off of that bad monetization stuff there a problem with like some of the Eastern
games man is that like they have some of the most overt monetization and it just makes you want to have nothing to do with their game they have such great premises for games and then they just ruin it and I'll be honest with you like I look at a game like lost Arc I think this is probably the best example of it lost Arc as a concept is such an incredible game but the problem is is that you put all the like gotcha mechanics with leveling up weapons that completely undermine the reason why you would
play a game like that in the first place if you're playing an MMO it's to get cool weapons and equipment and make your character stronger but when you make people pay for that but then why would I even play the game the achievement of getting that stuff rather than buying it is the reason why people like playing those games in the first place doesn't make any sense to me I don't know anyway speaking of 2025 this is likely my last video of the year uh I just want to say thank you guys for everything uh
this year has been wild I was laid off this time last year and in a year's time here I am now in a new career that you guys have so graciously given to me because you guys support this channel you guys support the videos you share the videos you subscribe you like the videos and comment and hang out in the Discord and show up to streams and stuff like that and it's changed my life in an Indescribable way I'm not a rich man or anything like that I'm just living a solid life and I'm doing
something that I love to do and I appreciate you guys for empowering me to be able to do just that and I just want to say thank you that's it stay cool stay righteous stay safe and uh Merry Christmas you filthy animals PE family family family family go to join delet me.com drops and use the code drops for 20% off it's the easy way to take control of your personal information and protect your privacy online thank you to delete me for sponsoring today's video now let's get to it
