SteamDB indicates Multiversus is facing dropping active player numbers, as it is losing a lot of the interest the fans had in it.
Multiversus is Warner Bros Games’ attempt to join the space occupied by Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl. All these games are classified under the category of platform fighters, which combine elements of platformer games and fighting games.
Like other fighting games, players face other opponents in a stage and they have to defeat all their opponents to win. While the win conditions can vary for this subgenre, usually the win condition is to get all opponents out of the stage by raising the amount of damage they receive and forcing them to be knocked back.
The platforming element of these games arrive in the stages themselves. As opposed to the flat stages of Street Fighter or the 3D rings of Virtua Fighter, platform fighters compete in uneven stages, often floating stages so that characters can fall off the bottom or fly from the sides. The characters can jump up and down the different parts of these stages to fight or run away from other characters.
Platform fighters have a strange position in the fighting game community. While they had previously been derided as “party games” because the game elements discourage competitive play, these games build up competitive communities anyway, by using limited and modified rulesets, and finding the small intricacies of the game to rank playable characters.
Multiversus was ostensibly made for casual players, who would be interested in playing as the many characters under Warner Bros’ umbrella. In fact, characters vary across the board from cartoons like Looney Tunes and Adventure Time, live action properties like Game of Thrones, and comic book characters like Black Adam. However, it also benefited from the entry of the competitive community, who had a large interest in a new platform fighter that wasn’t tied to Nintendo’s platforms.
This is why the news that Multiversus is seeing lower player numbers is disappointing. From July’s peak of 153,044 players, the game now has only 4,709 active players at the launch of Season 2.
This drop in numbers was consistent and can be observed month after month;
- July – 153,044 players
- August – 139,095 players
- September – 22,037 players
- October – 8,375 players
- November – 4,709
While these metrics are disappointing, they may turn out to be growing pains for Multiversus in the end. The game is actually still in open beta, so nobody has yet to buy the game or any possible DLC. The point of this open beta period has been to gather interest from fans, and also get feedback on where the game should go.
It may be too early to speculate on why the players are dropping off. It’s possible that there are issues with the game design, or that players aren’t happy playing through the bugs and issues that still exist. It may also be a situation where only the whales have been left playing and the game needs to be redesigned to better cater to casual fans. Warner Bros Games is definitely looking to find out what the problem is, and what they can do to make things better.
Source: GameRant via Pledge Times
