NetEases’s Marvel Rivals released on December 6th and since then, Steam announced that the game had broken their concurrent player record by having a massive 39.2 million players online at one time. Director of the game, Thaddeus Sasser, spoke with Videogamer.com about why “hero shooters” have to bring something special and unique to get players to switch from one to another.
There’s a switching cost. I’ve already invested in Overwatch, I’ve got 15 skins for Pharah, I’m not going anywhere.
As a game developer you’re always worried until the audience has responded. The truth is that I don’t think anybody can accurately predict this or the game industry would be radically different today. There’s a lot of games that come out that people are like, ‘It’s going to do well,’ then it flops or people come out and go, ‘It’s going to flop,’ and it succeeds amazingly. So, I think it’s really hard to tell ahead of time and you’re always worried about that.
Sasser stated that the market is unpredictable at the end of the day and that Marvels Rivals having popular superhero IP is what brought fans in.
I don’t know about you, but when I heard the concept of the game I was like, ‘Oh my God I want to go be Storm in a game, I want to go be Doctor Strange in a game. I want to be those heroes in the game, that sounds awesome.’ And of course my mind immediately leapt to all the cool possibilities you could have with that. That’s what I think will pull people in as well too. If we’ve done our jobs well, they’ll love what they play and they’ll want to play some more.
Marvel Rivals is currently receiving solid feedback from fans and is available now to play on PlayStation, Xbox, and Windows.