In a crushing example of just how fast one’s lunch can be eaten if they become complacent and allow a competitor to swoop in and supersede them, as a result of Marvel Rivals finally providing players with a ‘fresh’ take on the Hero Shooter genre, Overwatch 2 has seen its concurrent Steam player numbers drop to an all time low.
Featuring a third-person gameplay perspective, a roster of 33 unique heroes (with more already in-development), a colorful cast of Marvel Comics all stars, and a price-tag of ‘free’, Marvel Rivals has debuted to an absolutely stunning amount of player interest, pulling in roughly 10 million total players across the Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC platforms since officially launching on December 6th.
Notably, roughly 2 million of these players, as per platform information aggregator SteamDB, come from Steam.
Of course, whether or not this initial interest in the game will translate into long-term staying power or prove itself to be a ‘flash-in-the-pan’ moment resulting from both the game’s free-to-play model and the fact that it’s new remains to be seen.
However, what is clear is that the work developer NetEase put in to their latest multiplayer title is hitting all the right spots for players across the planet.
For a concrete example of this fact, look no further than the fact that in the days since Marvel Rivals‘ release, the former King of the Hero Shooters, Overwatch 2, has seen a significant dip in its overall player count.
Admittedly, the only publicly available information to this trend are the game’s Steam numbers, which notably excludes the player count numbers from other online services like PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Nintendo Online, and Blizzard’s own proprietary Battle.net.
But even by Steam’s limited data, this phenomena is both clearly on display and outright staggering.
Whereas months prior saw Overwatch 2 regularly enjoy consecutive player counts upwards of 40,000 at any given time, with the arrival of Marvel Rivals, the Blizzard title has not only barely managed to push into the mid-30,000 range, but also seen its consecutive player count regularly fall below 20,000.
In fact, on December 9th, Overwatch 2 hit a consecutive player low of 16,919 – it’s absolute lowest in since first arriving on Steam in August 2023.
While the situation is not explicitly dire for Overwatch 2‘s future, it does suggest that while rather than a vague sense of ‘Hero Shooter Fatigue’ being responsible for the recent collapse of the genre – just look at Bandai Namco’s Gundam Evolution, Sega’s cancelled-before-released Hyenas, and of course, Sony’s own Concord – it seems that what has truly caused players to spent their playtime elsewhere is the general ‘stale-ness’ of current offerings.
In terms of Overwatch 2, anyone who has spent more than a decent amount of time playing the game can attest that Blizzard’s schedule of ‘three new characters (if players are lucky, as 2020 saw the release of only one playable hero, Echo) and maps apiece each year” leads to genuine periods of stagnation where play time feels more like a chore than a fun experience.
Further, there’s something to be said about the fact that Marvel Rivals‘ art style both presents a fresh take on the titular publisher’s roster of heroes and villains and does so in a highly-stylized and visually co-hesive manner, whereas Overwatch 2 has all but abandoned the series’ original design philosophy of making colorful and unique heroes in favor of ‘inclusive character design’.
As a result, most of the characters thus far introduced in Overwatch 2 (save maybe Sojourn, Ramattra, and Juno) all feel visually mismatched and off-putting, thus ruining a given player’s immersion into the game itself.
All in all, while it remains to be seen whether Marvel Rivals actually has staying power, it’s clear that the Hero Shooter is currently drawing such massive interest that it’s pulling players en masse away from already established titles.
(Now, can we please get a proper Ben Reilly Scarlet Spider skin instead of that god-awful Chasm abomination?)