Marvel superheroes like Wolverine and Captain America are featured alongside characters such as Scarlet Witch and Rocket Raccoon. — NetEase Games
Marvel Rivals, a new video game from NetEase Inc and Walt Disney Co, is climbing PC and console charts this holiday season, making the free-to-play superhero shooter title a fresh hit for the two companies.
Released Dec 5, Marvel Rivals is among the top five games being played right now on PlayStation 5, Xbox and PC, according to data from market researcher Circana. The game is seeing a spike in interest on Amazon.com Inc’s livestreaming site Twitch, where nearly 100,000 people at any moment are watching gamers play it.
Early in its development, Marvel Rivals was written off as another clone of Microsoft Corp’s hit multiplayer shooter game Overwatch. One of the biggest games ever, Overwatch sold more than 50 million copies with its colourful settings and diverse characters, drawing in players unaccustomed to the shooter genre. But the 2022 successor, Overwatch 2, ultimately failed to retain its large audience.
Marvel Rivals captures the lure of the original Overwatch. It offers a cast of well-designed heroes and villains who fight over objectives using a variety of abilities and weapons. It builds on that formula with more polished mechanics and a comic-book edge to its style. The game is easy to learn but challenging to master.
Marvel superheroes like Wolverine and Captain America are featured alongside characters such as Scarlet Witch and Rocket Raccoon. Each character fights, heals or blocks damage using moves inspired by their original comics or storylines.
Many of the characters are simple, like the Punisher, who shoots a gun and throws grenades. Others, like Spider-Man, are surprisingly challenging and involve swinging around settings.
In mid-December, the developers announced on X that 20 million people had signed up for the game. Free-to-play titles like Marvel Rivals make money through in-game sales of virtual merchandise to players.
Although films from the Marvel universe are no longer a sure thing, recent Marvel video games have done well. Both Marvel Snap, in 2022, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, the next year, were lucrative for Disney, with the latter selling more than 10 million copies. Critics reviewed 2022’s Marvel’s Midnight Suns positively though it was commercially underwhelming. – Bloomberg
