NetEase Games has made a big announcement for Marvel Rivals.
The official Marvel Rivals Twitter account made this statement:
“We are thrilled to announce that 20 million players have joined Marvel Rivals! Our gratitude for each of you is immense!
The spray is ready now, and we also included this number in the spray! Thank you for helping us achieve this milestone.
Log in from December 20th, 2024, to January 10th, 2025, to claim it!”
For those who were a little confused, sprays are Marvel Rivals‘ version of graffiti tags, that any player can spray on any walls in the game maps. The spray they are referring to here depicts an SD/chibi version of Galacta, and it was really just intended to celebrate their early launch. As NetEase revealed, that spray will now also celebrate that 20 million player milestone.
At the start of the week, NetEase revealed that they have a holiday event already lined up. Aside from the “Jeff’s Winter Splash Festival” event, there are Christmas themed skins for Rocket Raccoon, Magik, Venom, and Groot, who particularly looks like some kind of Christmas Creature.
So we can see that NetEase is in a festive mood for the launch of their big Marvel franchise game. As things stand, Marvel Rivals is definitely THE big Marvel video game, more successful than other big efforts like the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy games published by Square Enix.
We know it won’t be alone in that distinction for very long, with Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra looming in the background, and other titles like Marvel’s Wolverine and Marvel’s Blade deep in development. But it’s easy to see that this will be the game that Marvel fans will be playing consistently for the next few months, and even years, as Disney figures out what else they could be doing with their comic book franchise.
Or will they? While one can argue that Marvel Rivals is better positioned for success than, say, a potential new Marvel Vs. Capcom fighting game, NetEase also knows that they entered a very challenging market.
With high budgets and high production values come high expectations, and Marvel Rivals can easily see this initial success slip in the months to come. We won’t relitigate the track record of 2024’s other live service games here, but we will point out few games can claim to have had a true sustainable impact like Fortnite or PUBG.
And if we were honest, Pokémon Go would seem to indicate that even Fortnite and PUBG can’t really expect that their fans will stick around forever. In spite of what financial analysts want you to believe, no one can really reliably predict what the video game industry will be like in the long term.
If this were the case, Nintendo would not have been disrupted by Sony with the PlayStation, Sony and Microsoft would not have been disrupted by Nintendo with the Wii, and console games itself would not have been disrupted by mobile gaming. And mobile games itself would not have been disrupted by a true multiplatform phenomenon like Fortnite.
Maybe NetEase doesn’t really need Marvel Rivals to last forever; after all, they definitely didn’t get a lifetime license from Disney. But we’ll know there are definite revenue and other metrics that NetEase has to meet to say they made this game a success. It’s now a matter of keeping the fans around and engaged enough for them to get there.
