Marvel Rivals Director Wasn’t Sure The Game Would Be A Hit: “You’re Always Worried Until The Audience Has Responded”

Marvel Rivals’ game designer revealed something that may actually surprise you: they weren’t sure that the game would succeed.

In an interview for the VideoGamer Podcast, we learned that this title’s director was actually Thaddeus Sasser. While some fans may have envisioned that NetEase had a primarily Chinese game studio to make this game, NetEase actually set up a studio in Seattle to work with their Guangzhou team just for this title.

That was, of course, one of many smart calls that NetEase made. Marvel has a truly international appeal, and NetEase rightly saw the need to have American developers to keep them grounded on what Marvel fans who live outside China would be expecting from the game.

Hiring Thaddeus Sasser was another smart call. We are talking a 20 + year old veteran, who has worked for Activision, Ubisoft, and Electronic Arts, on AAA shooters like Call of Duty, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, and Battlefield. One of his earliest credits is as a tester for Quake III: Team Arena.

You would think that a man with that degree of experience would be supremely confident in his work, but that’s not the case at all. In this interview, Sasser is asked about Concord. While Sasser agrees with their host’s opinions that there were multiple reasons for Concord’s failure, he makes it crystal clear that he was absolutely worried that something like that could happen to them.

In Sasser’s words:

“As a game developer you’re always worried until the audience has already responded. The truth is that I don’t think anybody can accurately predict this or the game industry would be radically different today.

There’s a lot of games that come out where people are like ‘it’s going to do well’ then it flops or people come out and go ‘it’s going to flop’ and it succeeds amazingly. So, I think it’s really hard to tell ahead of time and you’re always worried about that.

But I think the trick is that 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.

Like, I don’t know about you, but when I heard the concept of the game I was like ‘Oh my God I want to go be Storm in a game’, ‘I want to go be Doctor Strange in a game’. I want to be those 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’s what I think will pull people in as well too. And then if we’ve done our jobs well, they’ll love what they play and they’ll want to play some more.”

Sasser went on to explain that the high player numbers they had in open beta did not make him confident either. To paraphrase, it would be a different situation once the game would actually go live.

The whole interview is worth listening to, for more details on how the game was made, as well as some Marvel fandom talk. But as we had reported a few days ago, Marvel Rivals definitely had a successful launch. And we’re reassured that NetEase have the right people in the studio to ensure that it becomes an enduring success. Sasser also pointed out that the industry needs a win right now, and he and his team have certainly delivered one.