Summary
Marvel Rivalshas been losing players for quite a while, which is something that happens to most games as time goes on and the attention of the public starts to waver. However, Marvel Rivals has seen its player base drop rapidly ever since Season 1 kicked off in January, going from over 640,000 players on Steam at its peak, to around 130,000 players before the launch of Season 2.5 less than five months later.
There’s always a bump whenever a new season of a live-service game starts, and due to howexhausting and annoying the dive meta was in Season 2, it was expected that we might see a large influx of players coming back to check out the new stuff like Ultron and the Jeff rework. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to have happened, as, while numbers have increased somewhat, this season’s player bump is the smallest so far.
Marvel Rivals Player Numbers Are Still Plummeting After Season 2.5 Launch
It’s particularly glaring when you see the graph on SteamDB. If you look at the spikes for the start of other seasons, you’ll see that player numbers drastically increase. For example, the start of Season 1.5 saw a jump of over 117,000 plyers, while te start of Season 2 saw Marvel Rivals player numbers almost double, going from 170,000 to 315,000.
Season 2.5’s bump is far less impressive, only seeing an increase of just less than 60,000. It’s still a fairly impressive number of players for a live-service game, but it is a sign that NetEase is both struggling to keep players, and struggling to get them to return.
This comparatively small number of returning players is starting to make the more dedicated Marvel Rivals fans worry, and discussions were had on social media about the reason for the small bump for Season 2.5.In a Reddit thread posted by a user called MonkeyCube, a lot of people seem to think it’s the fault of the game’s matchmaking, with one user called SJMR24 claiming one-sided matches are “killing the game”.
Another theory is that it’s the rapidly changing metas that form every update, which will get even more frequentwhen NetEase starts dropping a new character every month. It can be exhausting for a causal player to try and keep up with a meta in one season, only to find it has completely shifted in the next season when they next play.Going from a dive meta to a fliers metais about as jarring as you can get.
Then you have smaller complaints like balance changes, toxicity among the player base, and the likelihood that you’ll get rolled in quick play because all the broken heroes are fair game. Marvel Rivals appears to be floundering at the minute, and it seems like NetEase isn’t doing much to address the issues that most people have.
