While many live service games are struggling to break into the crowded market, one success story from 2024 is NetEase Games’ Marvel Rivals. Launching in December across PC as well as Xbox and PlayStation consoles, Marvel Rivals has quickly skyrocketed up past many of its failed peers.
Sharing data on monthly active users in games for December 2024, analytics firm Newzoo notes that Marvel Rivals was the third most-played game of the month across several countries, including the U.S and the U.K. Marvel Rivals only fell behind two familiar juggernauts, Fortnite and Call of Duty.
That’s backed up with data from Circana executive director and analyst Mat Piscatella, who shared that for the week ending Dec. 28, 2024, Marvel Rivals was actually the most-played game on Steam, snagging the third and fourth place slots on Xbox and PlayStation, respectively. While Circana’s data is only for video games in the U.S., it still points to the impact that Marvel Rivals has had so far — quickly becoming one of the most-played games across every platform, getting players to peel away from their usual interests.
The success of Marvel Rivals stands in direct opposition to the problems many new entrants in the live service space have seen over the last couple of years. 2024 saw the launch of PlayStation’s Concord, a title that was taken offline weeks later due to a low player count. While the company has found success with Helldivers 2, it’s also recently canceled two other live service games before they were even announced, again pointing to how difficult it is for some of these games to even get off the ground.
I’ve written before about the problem with “black hole” games, referring to how evergreen titles like Call of Duty, Fortnite, various sports titles, and others are capturing the vast majority of players’ attention, leaving increasingly narrow space for new games to operate.
Marvel Rivals has several different factors in its favor. The game is completely free-to-play, with cross-play across platforms. It’s using an incredibly popular setting, capitalizing on interest in the Marvel universe. It’s a great-looking game, with sharp art direction that highlights the varied costumes available for its cast, making spending money on alternate outfits tempting.
None of that should be taken for granted as a clear method for triumph; Plenty of games that looked great and ran well from the start have failed to garner attention for one reason or another. Other games have started off strong but faltered through updates over time.
I don’t know what the answer is for the market at large. Still, I’m happy to see a new game breaking ground and proving that it’s still possible to capture players’ attention at a time when its never been harder. It’ll be interesting to see if the development team at NetEase Games can maintain this momentum throughout 2025 and beyond.
Marvel Rivals is currently free-to-play on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, and PlayStation 5.
