Marvel Rivals continues to demonstrate its great success a month after its release.
As logged on SteamDB, the game reached a peak of 644,269 concurrent players last Saturday. Impressively, it continues to retain a high player base, though there is a particular time when the player base ebbs and flows. Our guess is most of the players are based in America, as player numbers go up when it’s nighttime at that part of the world, and start dipping when it hits the early hours of dawn. Interestingly, the pattern of player behavior is consistent enough that it forms a shape somewhere between a sinusoidal and ramp waveform.
SteamDB shows it has hit number 14 in the most played games on Steam with that peak, behind the likes of Black Myth Wukong, Palworld, DOTA 2, Hogwarts Legacy, and of course, Banana. That’s an incredible achievement for a game that’s just hit season 1, but we would also want to point to something else here.
Nexon’s The First Descendant seemingly demanded attention when it launched last year to huge player numbers. It reached a respectable concurrent player peak of 264,860 players, even if it faced criticism for not having content that is that respectable. But one can trace a significant drop in its player base not too long after Marvel Rivals itself launched, and it hasn’t been the same ever since. As of this writing, The First Descendant has a concurrent player count of 7,696 players.
Of course, even while we try to establish a correlation does not necessarily mean there is causation. There are other factors to Nexon’s title dropping its players, as it started even before Marvel Rivals’ launch. There were questions on the game’s monetization, but in earnest, there wasn’t enough in the game design to keep their players interested.
And yes, of course a lot of gamers talked up the sex appeal of playable characters in both these games. But that doesn’t account for the popularity of games that deliberately obfuscate that appeal, such as Helldivers 2. Nexon found out firsthand that that can certainly help, but it’s certainly not enough in this competitive market.
And as successful as NetEase has been, there should be enough veterans in that studio to know that they can’t rest on their laurels. Even with no competition in the horizon, it is inevitable for other big titles to emerge and take their crown, and it need not be another new game like theirs either. As the big Marvel themed video game in the near future, NetEase is going to have to work hard to keep gamers and Marvel fans happy.
