Marvel Rivals Made the Most Out of a Bad Time for Live Service Games
2024 was generally a down year for new video game releases, but the situation was especially bad for established competitive multiplayer franchises. Most notably, Call of Duty: Warzone—the free-to-play battle royale that typically drew the biggest crowd of casual PvP fans looking for a multiplayer game to lose themselves in—suffered through a series of poorly-received updates that sent its influencers and players scrambling for alternatives.
What did they find? The usual suspects, mostly. Games like League of Legends, Counter-Strike, and Valorant were there, but they’ve long had a reputation for being slightly more unfriendly to new and more casual players. Battle royales like Fortnite and Apex Legends offered more direct Warzone alternatives, but both are far removed from their golden ages at this point. Others, of course, turned back to Overwatch.
More than anything, Marvel Rivals has been a breaker of the complacency most evident in the hero shooter genre where Overwatch has long ruled, but that’s hardly the only example. The live service, PvP scene is filled with games that have quietly sat atop the player count and view charts without doing much new or particularly exciting in quite some time. That’s a big part of the reason why studios continue to make live-service PvP games despite so many failures along the way. They’re convinced that their game can be the next big thing.
But why did Marvel Rivals succeed where so many of those other games have failed? What makes it different from something like Concord which launched in a similar genre around the same time? You could argue Marvel Rivals is simply better, though that doesn’t always matter. Marvel Rivals‘ free-to-play status certainly gave it an advantage over the $40, microtransaction-filled Concord, though other free-to-play games have come and gone in the same territory. That alone isn’t enough.
It all comes back to Marvel Rivals’ ability to generate excitement. You can get a lot done by generating excitement among the complacent and jaded. Marvel Rivals invigorated hero shooter fans with its complex and chaotic gameplay, PvP fans with its sudden rise in popularity, and pretty much everyone with its generous use of the Marvel license. Interestingly, Marvel executed a similar release and design strategy with Marvel Snap, the 2022 CCG game that successfully challenged Hearthstone.
Is Marvel simply targeting Blizzard properties that have long reigned over oversaturated genres with few viable challengers in sight? Perhaps, but Marvel Rivals’ success is bigger than any single genre, franchise, or company. Unfortunately, it’s doubtful the rest of the industry will see it that way.