Netease Games’ Marvel Rivals has been wildly successful, garnering an impressive number of players in a few short months since its initial launch on December 6, 2024. The game has since managed to break through the player count astronomically – with its Season 1 launch.
As per SteamDB, the hero PvP shooter (which uses existing Marvel universe IPs and characters for its lore and playable cast of characters) is at a record high of 500,000+ players – which is an absurdly high, admirable number.
Going by the graphs on SteamDB, this peak occurred sometime between January 10, 2025 and January 11, 2025 – coinciding with the release of Season 1, Eternal Night Falls. As of the time of writing this article, there are around 610,275 players in-game currently.
The game hit a peak of 644,269 concurrent players globally in the past 2 hours as well.
Combined with a rating of 80.21% (positive, based on over 145k reviews!) Marvel Rivals is quite the success story for Netease Games and Marvel Games as a whole. Marvel has historically been somewhat of a mixed bag in terms of video game releases compared to DC, and this turn of events is quite promising.
While a lot of factors can be associated with the massive jump in popularity of Rivals, the free to play aspect and non-intrusive microtransactions could be major reasons for the same.
After all, unlike some other hero shooters, Rivals is entirely free to play, and only imposes restrictions on its cosmetics – with every hero being added to the roster, free of charge. Combined with an overall fun gameplay experience (which reminds us of Overwatch back in its glory days) and timely, engaging events and updates it should come as no shocker that Rivals is so widely successful.
Hopefully, Netease Games is not done with Rivals just yet, and has more surprises for us in store, ahead of Season 2 and beyond.
