Marvel Rivals Is Dominating, And It Isn't Even Close.

we've all heard it said that hero Shooters are declining oversaturated genre and we know that there's a sizable graveyard we just saw Concord die but of course that's an assessment that does not gel with Marvel Rivals is absolutely gigantic success because somehow in a year where everybody has been mocking Publishers over hero Shooters and generally just mocking a lot of life service titles Marvel Rivals is absolutely thriving and that is not an overstatement it got 10 million players in its first 72 hours and by now it's actually hit 20 million this is so much activity

that steam's back end even struggled and for some developers it broke they were not able to access the steam backend to update their stuff and this was all timed with Marvel Rivals absolutely ramming valve servers and of course their servers were getting rammed by both 10cent and Netties because at the same time Path of Exile 2 did happen to be doing quite well so much so that together steam actually hit a new concurrency record of 39.2 million users online at once which is crazy but that's not what's truly noteworthy to me a free-to-play game exploding

and then just falling to pieces or people quickly running away a flash in the pan that is not a surprise it's actually what we tend to expect and on the internet when people tell you something is shocking it's often hyperbole here no this is a shocking chart this is the retention that we are seeing with Marvel Rivals and this is genuinely impressive it has essentially maintained its launch Peak for an entire fortnite this this is a vanishingly rare achievement it is absolutely stunning The Daily lows for this game are resting at 180k and uh well

they're good the highs are good and regular and I kind of remember the words of our earthw prime minister Tesa May strong and stable it's rare for a new game to be that strong and stable and if you're blizzard you're absolutely going to be feeling a sting so much so you'll definitely need to check out today's sponsor g.d they're a longtime Channel supporter and they actually just got better so what they do right is they teach you backend development using Python and go they're structured as a community RPG they're made by fellow viewers of this

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really cool made by Two Brothers you can tell that the whole thing is made with so much heart because um yeah big corporations just can't really do it like that with my link you get 25% off your first purchase so i' go for annual that's how you save the most money and of course if it's not for you they have a no questions asked 30-day refund and of course you can actually browse their materials and their demos for free so what the hell's going on here Marvel Rivals is a free to play just like OverWatch

but that's not really an even comparison because of price anchoring OverWatch one was a paid game and it was far less of a playable storefront than OverWatch 2 has ended up being and that's what made OverWatch 2 sting of course contrasted with all of the cool stuff that we were shown at biscot that of course never ended up happening with Rivals well it just has audience expectations being met everybody knows what to expect I mean for an extreme example on this very Channel we caught a lot of flack for being harsh on the Delta Force

microtransaction to us they were pretty damn bad microtransactions that's why we criticized them pretty damn heavy in that video but um clearly a lot of people didn't care at all really and I imagine it's because it was a free-to-play game and it basically met their expectations here then Rivals is made by NY games there are group who absolutely know how to retain players based on the countless large scale free-to-play live service titles that they run many of which of course are on mobile and well they have many investments in so many other games as well

now brand wise this is got Marvel but it's got a flavor of Marvel that at least from my Outsiders perspective doesn't seem tarnished by MCU fatigue I mean looking at the game they're clearly leaning into comic art in a way that's actually cool their designs shine it is the opposite of Concord concord's a game that did have a few banging bits of concept art but my god there are not even words to describe how badly that all translated into Sony photo real 3D it just didn't work but Marvel Rivals has another strength it is not

wholly original and you may think that's me just absolutely launching into an attack but look it is pretty similar to OverWatch but that's not really the main point one person who did try to make a point in this though was Mike kibara our dearly departed blizzard president who is still out there hunting down some tasty high growth opportunities he launched a rather Infamous tweet I'm just going to read it out for you and hey you got to get it here because he deleted the original quote looks like OverWatch Marvel rival ships tomorrow I mean even

the character name Widowmaker and OverWatch versus Black Widow and Marvel Rivals LOL n's 10cent all the same oh Mike Mike kind of had a point buried through the stupidity but the Tweet absolutely is just him literally saying that black widow a character introduced in the year 1964 was a Widowmaker knockoff which is not true you could maybe say his actual point though is the character kits in a way it makes the point he was trying to make but it also shows why people are resonating with this game Black Widow has got a rifle it's got

a scope move that does more damage she's got a grappling hook so yeah she will totally appeal to Widowmaker Mains but take a look at gameplay footage they have added to the kit you've got a knockback kick you've got a melee baton plus charged plasma round and it does come together to actually play differently now I get why you Bara tweeted but the gameplay here is different especially with its close- range third-person brawl element that's going on and that's the point Rivals does not just copy generally speaking it iterates now there's always going to be

genre crossover maybe I'm going to take a look at say paladins from highz but Marvel Rivals is different like OverWatch it's got the split between tank DPS and support and many of the 33 launch Heroes do have direct crossovers some that are absolutely leaned into I mean black widow probably doesn't need to be a sniper and yeah she'll definitely be like that to appeal to the Widowmaker Mains and some of them are inherent like Hawkeye and Hanzo who are both bow users or Symetra and Doctor Strange who both use portals but the thing that matters

is that Rivals gets to cook with almost 70 years of inspiration and a wealth of real world player experience from other hero Shooters and that means what we've got is a slick game that is an iteration rather than a clone that is the point that yar's absolutely dunked on tweet missed and I think it's why this is a game that is actually surprising and delighting people it has iterated and brought its formula forward and in a way it's done that against traditional wisdom that would say that hero Shooters on the downtrend that there's MCU fatigue

and that the track record with hero games is actually pretty damn bad when we think Hero game we're all just going to think of PlayStation Spider-Man but that's because we've forgotten the massive graveyard of dead games and even the Marvel graveyard which will of course have square enix's Avengers in it that was very much the LOL cow of its here but even good games that have got like big popular Marvel Superheroes have failed to meet Financial expectations we've got two examples of this one is Guardians of the Galaxy and the other is faris's midnight sons

and the thing is the those were both really good well-reviewed games that just didn't sell and then of course there's the now rather end of life Suicide Squad kill the Justice League before that there's Gotham Knights so it's not been a good time by comparison though Marvel Rivals has got half of the internet standing Jeff the bloody land shark who I didn't even know existed and it turns out has only existed since 2019 so this is not a case of put heroes in it that people know and suddenly everyone will start playing no what they've

done is they've nailed the basics they have carefully chosen some deep pools they've chosen things that everybody knows and they've executed it all to an extremely high standard the mechanical diversity of this game especially considering that it's only just launched is absolutely insane and that's a large part of why people will play it over Overwatch one team can have let's see a teleporting ninja fight multiple flight based characters web swingers and where the web swinging actually feels good if you've got Rocket and Groot then you actually get an entirely new ability and game-wide mechanic on

top of your existing set and uh to quote from the games director the awesomely named fadus Sasser well he basically said this I don't know about you but when I heard the concept of the game I was like oh my God I want to be storm in a game I want to be doctor strange in a game I want these heroes in the game that sounds awesome and of course my mind immediately leapt to all the cool possibilities you could have with that and that seems like a very trite thing I mean of course he's

going to say that he's the director for the the game and it's absolutely not a fair onetoone comparison but you know what appears in my head Suicide Squad killed the Justice League where the first reaction from most people when they watch that E3 trailer was oh this looks like a generic third person shooter why are we just uh doing shoot bang with guns this doesn't really feel like Heroes which obviously broad Market perception what consumers thought was not enough to get that game any cut through but look that's enough lavishing this game with praise let's

get back to business especially because there's a statistic that puts this whole thing in context Matt piscatella has got two decades of Industry analysis experience he's the executive director of cirana they're a longtime analytics firm they are not small you actually may know one of the companies they just acquired neelen as in neelen of television ratings Fame so they a big fish with massive corporate clients literally their stock in trade is actually having good analytics and what's great is Matt shares loads of games data in public this chart shows the percentage of weekly actives by

game title and better than anything this shows just how Winner Takes all this industry is because we can see that the top five games hold 75% of audiences like just by player numbers and if you're an indie in a way that's okay because you're fighting for the 25% of the audience not the big 75% you don't need that insane level of scale to be successful but if you are a major AAA live service you need to make a dent in that 75% you need to fight with those games that are taking so many people in

an absolute winner takes all industry and of course it's failing to do that that leads to the likes of say x defyant going under the way that it did Concord immediately dying because there was no real Universe where it was going to get itself to where it needed to be and it's in that context that Rivals is actually impressive because in a winner takes all industry it has managed to get cut through and this is what their director had to say it's pretty wise there's a switching cost I've already invested in OverWatch I've got 15

skins for Farah I'm not going anywhere I think the trick is you need to have that reason that people want to come and play your game and I think Marvel Rivals does that exactly with the superhero and that's basically the big Point nailing fantasy and using the comics as an excuse to go extremely hard on designs and to make those designs fundamentally appealing that has worked look I'm not trying to be cruel to Concord on purpose but just look at the skin variants look at what they look like and now look at the things that

you can buy with within this game so uh Mr Herman Holst of PlayStation if you're confused about why Concord which you reportedly were really bullish about if you're kind of confused why it didn't really work out this is a really good example but even with all that good there are two things to discuss number one business model it's coming under some critique in four strange ways because it does seem a little bit prly thought out but also that this game is actually walking a very similar path to OverWatch and they are going to have to

be careful and make sure that they do not step into all of the breaks that of course blizzard stepped into meaning the blizzard hit themselves in the face monetization first and I'd say that it's mixed though fundamentally it does have something that OverWatch does not have in that it is a third person game now if you look at counter- strike I mean obviously it's guns and knives because those are the most tangible and visible things but with say League of Legends which has now got hyper expensive skins that can cost hundreds of dollars that's third

person you can see your character it's almost as if regularly seeing the thing that you're expected to buy kind of matters Rivals then has got the standard Suite it's got a battle pass it's got cosmetic bundles but where things get a little bit dementia inducing is of course currencies is one of those so all those things I mentioned are purchased using units and you can get units through battle pass progression challenges events and something that ntis knows very well indeed promo codes so you may not know this if you don't play them but promo codes

are a massive part of the gacha game world and culture basically gacha game players are not stupid they know that it is a crazy gambling hellscape but the piece is kept because the G companies generally deliver a shitload of content and they're often quite generous when it comes to things like promo codes especially in major holidays and anniversaries so their inclusion here is a smart leg up on the western competition it means if they just want to hit the engagement lever they can do that now what's odd then is the premium currency which is called

ltis it's $1 per 100 it's purchasable in discounted bundles which all seems completely normal but what's strange is it's used in only one way converting all of your lattice into units at a 1:1 ratio which does feel really quite over complicated then of course like fortnite there is a currency that you use within the battle pass to unlock things and now I have noticed pricing is Raising some eyebrows I mean yes things are extremely expensive and free toplay games you're basically looking at bundles costing $20 worth of units or $35 worth of units if it

is an MCU thing and of course to explain the MCU thing well obviously the mouse has got to get it cut but there is one thing where I actually think we've seen good movement here the Marvel Rivals battle passes do not expire just like Halo infinite and just like hell divers 2 this is one of the things that I have been hammering on about for quite a while now in the industry I think that expiring battle passes say in OverWatch 2 and so many other games are basically tantamount to fomo exploiting pseudo theft I mean

the idea that you could buy one of these things and then it'll just go Kut and and that they actually weaponize fomo to sell you progression through the thing that you already bought because whenever you buy a battle pass yeah you might intend to finish out the thing but life can get in the way if that happens in this video game you're still going to have your battle pass you will not have been screwed blizzard will happily screw you in all of their games with the way that they do their battle passes so this is

absolutely a good move and I hope that a real major game that is doing numbers like this implementing this type of battle pass actually gets rewarded because this is what needs to be the norm so overall it's mostly standard a little bit of a mixed bag but they have made a major piece of progress the next thing to talk about then is uh the challenge of running a game like this because already they are seeing cries and demands from players for the sorts of features that some people in OverWatch loved and others didn't launch OverWatch

one was a blast it was an often busted blast and many of us experienced that with the classic event now with top down pressure to focus in the OverWatch league and an internal desire to actually make OverWatch 2 PvE instead so that they could have a stepping stone to something that would approximate project Titan the failed MMO it's safe to say that OverWatch struggled with Direction just a little bit that still is playing out today where OverWatch has basically morphed into its PVP self and if you had hopes for anything else well man that just

sucks now Rivals is a bit like launch OverWatch some is completely busted and it's a a bloody good time that's thrilling players but it does mean they're seeing similar pressures a lot of people want some form of rooll log they will also want some form of roll que how are they going to deal with this and I say that because we've typically seen live service Shooters through a ranked progress first Esports focused lens something I see a lot of push back to in comments of our videos so navigating that is going to be a challenge

here especially because they have got such a broad audience an audience that in terms of its Dynamics I would say is far closer to the over OverWatch one ginormous audience than the far smaller and I suppose more clearly competitive PVP focused OverWatch 2 audience now where OverWatch was tored in between multiple directions it's clear that things are going to be a little bit different here because this game is launching the way that it was intended it's got three Monon Seasons multiple maps and heroes a season that's the way that the thing is set up they

also get to have obvious marketing around films major Comic things games but right now its real strength is a distinct lack of a calcified ranked PVP focused culture which is what's sat in in OverWatch 2 where of course lots of people within that culture don't agree with each other on what direction the game should go in and what that essentially means to me is that in terms of gameplay this is the inheritor to OverWatch one's Crown now from a worldbuilding perspective it is not an inheritor to OverWatch one and that is the thing that's tragic

about OverWatch one so many people fell in love with the world only to be profoundly let down where the OverWatch world has basically just turned into an excuse to have branded crossover events we live in hell but at least if you like that gameplay you've now got a game that seems catered to you and that E's challenge then is avoiding the mistakes of Blizzard on balance I actually think they will largely succeed in this one but only time will tell and if you want to check out another pretty hot bited news this video next