Hype dies off... The game is dead. (Player number evaluation)

[Tighty-Whitey]

Every hero shooter seems to hit a dead end every now and then and as we already know from past experience with hero shooters, Overwatch was not exception. The player base drained after questionable decisions developers have made along the way of supporting their game. If the game puts free-to-play approach as a forefront and focuses on bringing bits and pieces of content to players from time to time, if it's a live-service game, it is always a challenge for developers of such games to maintain quality in each and every update.

There are sides towards live-service games, with one being a live-service game that lacks content for a substantial amount of time, thus losing players by not being able to introduce improvements or to keep interest of player within the game with proper content updates. This corellates to Overwatch 2, as they've technically released Overwatch 1 yet again with as little effort as possible. And another side: a live-service game with an abundance of updates where the quality dips way too low due to the deadlines that the developers are required to hit and because they cannot make creative, quality updates fast and there is not enough time for their updates to spend in the oven, they take many unbalanced decisions that people did not want. This is what happened to Smite and Paladins. And of course, it is important to stay somewhere in the middle if it's a live-service game, but do the developers of Marvel Rivals understand that? Will they be able to hold the interest of players for long enough and cater to both casual and competitive audiences while making the game feel refreshing and not repetitive for it to hold the dedicated, big player base? Highly unlikely.

There was some fighting game, a name of which i don't quite recall, but it was also related to Marvel. It had a lot of players in the first weeks, but then, very quickly, hundreds of thousands of players left the game. That is quite problematic, it seems as if all Marvel products share the same fate. Also, with Deadlock coming out, another problematic Dota 2 inspired moba with hero shooter elements, the market for such games becomes as saturated as never before. Where exactly will the player numbers for Marvel Rivals in particular land in the long run? If we take a look at the tendency of hero shooters in modern days to be those one-timers that hold the players' interest for quite a while only for players to then migrate to other, more interesting and fresh experiences, we can easily draw a parallel and say that Marvel Rivals will share the same fate as other hero shooters like Overwatch. It's not easy to maintain a large portion of players in the game and it's important to look at many potential factors and outcomes that might occur that might make the game less interesting and forge plans on how to avoid that ahead of time. A dedication from the developers is needed when a development studio is forcing their way into an oversaturated market. Where will the player number go? From here, it will only go down, as the hype for this product in particular will not hold itself infinitely or long, unless it's a development studio that understands what it's doing with planning and being able to meet players' expectations. Let's take a look at the recent peak player number we've observed recently.

PLAYER NUMBERS

The player number for Marvel Rivals in its initial days had reached a peak of 480k players. 4 days ago at the time of writing is when that peak occurred and only four days later it dropped substantially to 380k players. Even less so, as it struggles to maintain 350k players at the time of evaluation. That means in the span of few days, in just less than a week, the game lost around 100k players. That is a big loss. If the game loses that many players in a short period of time, it means the current player number for the game is inflated and due to it being unstable it should drop down to something much lower than that. If we see players losing interest in another hero shooter so quickly with such a large dip, then even players currently playing the game right now are at question on whether they are willing to spend years and years playing a yet another hero shooter with "Marvel" slapped on it. Either way, we'll keep observing the data and see where the player number heads after that, but the prognosis for the player numbers and its extremely high dip in hype is just very dim for the future of Marvel Rivals. That means the game will lose players gradually and in the coming months might drop sub 100k quite easily, as the developers will certainly struggle to maintain high number of players down the line.

Update

Usually in order to speak well about Marvel Rivals and to feed themselves with misconceptions, some say that the player number depends on timezones and that during the day, people are either at work or studies. That turned out to be a fallacy, as at the time of writing, it is now evening around Europe and the player number situations not only hasn't improved, but worsened for the game with a heavy loss of 100k players down the line. Now we observe 200k players instead of 300k+ which is a severe drop. Numbers dropped faster than expected.

Update 2

Apparently the majority of the so-called "players" displayed by Steam for Marvel Rivals are fake. The game is plagued by bots set up by the developers to program players to think that the game is doing well and to also help newbies win matches. That explains why there is a dissonance between people being interested in the game and the actual numbers, because the game is simply not as popular as people thought. This is a fraud, meaning the numbers displayed aren't a representation of the actual player number. It is much lower than that and the game is on a heavy decline.

[pasta]

you're looking at pc players, it's crossplay. if smite and paladins has managed to keep servers running this long then rivals will surely be fine lmao.

[Hasher22]

There will always be a influx of players when a game is new, then it will settle down. Over the next month or two, we might see the real figures on who actually stays and how this game retains players.

For me in the Sydney server, I have noticed the QM queue wait times has gone from instant to 5 to 10 seconds. This will only get worse overtime.

[John Cena]

gimme a tldr please

[el pepe]

its a boring generic overwatch clone thats third person, its going to bomb off a cliff even though its actually kind of fun. Its a giant advertisement for their ass movies

[CaliTurian]

whats with the latex furry fetish branding lol

[Juken]

Why do people care so much about if a game's dead or not? I play games that live with like 40 players and still have fun.

You only have so much time before you're dead and less of a memory than this game. Enjoy the present of its thriving existence while you can if you enjoy it much like you should be doing with the rest of your life.

[Dodon]

Originally posted by John Cena:

gimme a tldr please

tldr; The usual doomsayer for another popular game, as usual. You can safely ignore them and miss out on nothing.

[Dragon]

Please stop comparing constant player numbers at launch to things. Wait at least 2-3 weeks for hype to die down, and THEN consider that the 'consistent' playerbase.

[Novostranger]

You said this on the Deadlock steam forums

[Shade]

even if the game dies more, currently it's 300k on steam. say that drops to 200k then you have console, say they drop as well, if a game has 300-400k(platform wide) concurrent players that's not really a dead game.

[Borko]

Originally posted by el pepe:

Its a giant advertisement for their ass movies

How? All the characters in the game are styled after their comic looks.

[Phantom Limb]

I ain't reading that wall of text lmao

[Lunar Fang]

I'm sorry I didn't read your novel.

[Walter White]

Originally posted by Tighty-Whitey:

Every hero shooter seems to hit a dead end every now and then and as we already know from past experience with hero shooters, Overwatch was not exception. The player base drained after questionable decisions developers have made along the way of supporting their game. If the game puts free-to-play approach as a forefront and focuses on bringing bits and pieces of content to players from time to time, if it's a live-service game, it is always a challenge for developers of such games to maintain quality in each and every update.

There are sides towards live-service games, with one being a live-service game that lacks content for a substantial amount of time, thus losing players by not being able to introduce improvements or to keep interest of player within the game with proper content updates. This corellates to Overwatch 2, as they've technically released Overwatch 1 yet again with as little effort as possible. And another side: a live-service game with an abundance of updates where the quality dips way too low due to the deadlines that the developers are required to hit and because they cannot make creative, quality updates fast and there is not enough time for their updates to spend in the oven, they take many unbalanced decisions that people did not want. This is what happened to Smite and Paladins. And of course, it is important to stay somewhere in the middle if it's a live-service game, but do the developers of Marvel Rivals understand that? Will they be able to hold the interest of players for long enough and cater to both casual and competitive audiences while making the game feel refreshing and not repetitive for it to hold the dedicated, big player base? Highly unlikely.

There was some fighting game, a name of which i don't quite recall, but it was also related to Marvel. It had a lot of players in the first weeks, but then, very quickly, hundreds of thousands of players left the game. That is quite problematic, it seems as if all Marvel products share the same fate. Also, with Deadlock coming out, another problematic Dota 2 inspired moba with hero shooter elements, the market for such games becomes as saturated as never before. Where exactly will the player numbers for Marvel Rivals in particular land in the long run? If we take a look at the tendency of hero shooters in modern days to be those one-timers that hold the players' interest for quite a while only for players to then migrate to other, more interesting and fresh experiences, we can easily draw a parallel and say that Marvel Rivals will share the same fate as other hero shooters like Overwatch. It's not easy to maintain a large portion of players in the game and it's important to look at many potential factors and outcomes that might occur that might make the game less interesting and forge plans on how to avoid that ahead of time. A dedication from the developers is needed when a development studio is forcing their way into an oversaturated market. Where will the player number go? From here, it will only go down, as the hype for this product in particular will not hold itself infinitely or long, unless it's a development studio that understands what it's doing with planning and being able to meet players' expectations. Let's take a look at the recent peak player number we've observed recently.

PLAYER NUMBERS

The player number for Marvel Rivals in its initial days had reached a peak of 480k players. 4 days ago at the time of writing is when that peak occurred and only four days later it dropped substantially to 380k players. Even less so, as it struggles to maintain 350k players at the time of evaluation. That means in the span of few days, in just less than a week, the game lost around 100k players. That is a big loss. If the game loses that many players in a short period of time, it means the current player number for the game is inflated and due to it being unstable it should drop down to something much lower than that. If we see players losing interest in another hero shooter so quickly with such a large dip, then even players currently playing the game right now are at question on whether they are willing to spend years and years playing a yet another hero shooter with "Marvel" slapped on it. Either way, we'll keep observing the data and see where the player number heads after that, but the prognosis for the player numbers and its extremely high dip in hype is just very dim for the future of Marvel Rivals. That means the game will lose players gradually and in the coming months might drop sub 100k quite easily, as the developers will certainly struggle to maintain high number of players down the line.

indeed. the honeymoon phase is slowly going away and the player count will continue to drop. a pile of dookie

[Peredur]

Yesterday (day of the patch), the peak didn't happen.
https://steamdb.info/app/2767030/charts/
We can see on the graph it's strangely flat. Not simply because there was less player overall. Just a part of the day where it stayed flat instead of increasing as it usually do. Rest of the day is similar to the previous days.
Just because of that anomaly, there was a peak of concurrent players at "only" 369k instead of going to 450k like a day earlier, or 441k like a day before (which is less, what can it mean?), or 461k like a day before, or 481k like a day before (record during a week end, like people play more during weekends...).
Without that anomaly, we can easy imagine the numbers to have stayed similar.

So, what is more probable? Players already left the game and the game is dead? Or some players didn't play during the evening because they missed their window as they had to patch the game first?

Please be a bit critical when using numbers from websites like steamdb. They don't show a total number of players but only a frequentation (for only one platform) that depends on the day, the time of the day and various external factors (for a peak at 370k players during a day, there have been way more than 370k on the game during the day).
Too often we see people try to directly using those numbers and they are too often used poorly (particularly by "journalist" that want to do a clic-bait article >.> ).