NetEase has made a huge announcement for their next big hero shooter, Marvel Rivals.
They made this statement on the official Marvel Rivals Twitter account:
“In just 72 hours, we’ve reached an incredible milestone of 10 million players worldwide!
We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you.
Let’s ignite the battle together!”
We reported before the weekend that the game hit 444,286 players three hours after launch. Today, SteamDB records that the game hit a new milestone over that weekend with a concurrent player peak of 480,990 players.
It’s vindication for NetEase that they made most, if not all, the right decisions when it came to launching this game. On the monetization front alone, they decided that all heroes would be free to play and switch around with at launch, and they recently revealed that players can finish battle passes at their leisure.
They also made the very smart choice to base monetization around cosmetics, and then proceeded to make the most irresistible cosmetics they could offer. But all of this early success comes in the shadow of dark portents around hero shooters and the live service video game genre in general.
Of course, the worst news is fresh in everyone’s minds. If there’s still any doubt that Concord is the worst failure of the video game industry (with Ubisoft and Star Citizen in contention), it was definitely the biggest failure this year. Subsequently, Ubisoft announcing that they would sunset XDefiant even before it finished its first year may reflect more on Ubisoft’s woes. But we know that XDefiant has seen a drop in revenue and engagement which brought them to this point.
Other live service games may not be at dire straits that XDefiant is, but they have very similar problems. Sony’s Helldivers 2 has seen its reputation recover, but it will never regain the player base it lost when Sony cut off access to all the Steam players in countries and regions that don’t have PSN. Subsequently, Overwatch 2 and Apex Legends may still be healthy, but we know that both games have seen serious dips in revenue and engagement.
Fans may point to different reasons for each live service title’s woes, but the worry NetEase now faces is more long term. Will they keep their players loyal for the long haul? How do they balance the needs of making a live service experience that caters to players who just want to enjoy having a power trip, and those players who actually care about competitive play?
In spite of MCU’s theoretical endless value as a license, even the most successful MCU video games (probably the Lego MCU games) haven’t been successful enough to keep going with new games. We don’t think this task is impossible, but we do think NetEase is going to have to come up with something other MCU game developers didn’t find yet.
