Unlike many recent Game-as-a-Service launches, Marvel Rivals has gotten off to a good start. The question is whether NetEase’s new hero shooter can retain its audience in the long term.
UPDATE (December 9): Marvel Rivals continued to perform well over the weekend, eventually peaking at over 480,990 concurrent players on December 8.
Launched globally on December 6, Marvel Rivals received a “Mostly Positive” on Steam, with 75% of the 4.2k reviews being positive. Users praised the game for fun gameplay, great roster of characters, and ethic monetization with non-expiring battle passes.
According to Steam Scout, 72.6% of all Steam reviews are written in English, followed by Portuguese – Brazil (6.69%), Simplified Chinese (5.51%), Spanish (4%), and Russian (2.77%). Interestingly, Marvel Rivals has the lowest rating among Chinese players, with users citing balance, matchmaking, and optimization as the main issues. As a result, the game only has 49% positive reviews in the country.
Despite some issues, Marvel Rivals peaked at 444,286 concurrent users on Steam (via SteamDB). Keep in mind that the game is also available on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and can be downloaded directly from its official website, so its actual active player count should be much higher.
Marvel Rivals is already the 4th biggest Steam release of 2024 in terms of peak CCU and the second NetEase game on the list. The two other free-to-play titles in the top 10 are also made by Asian companies: Throne and Liberty (NCSoft) and The First Descendant (Nexon).
Below are the top 10* biggest games of 2024 by peak concurrent players:
*Note: The list doesn’t include several games from the SteamDB charts: Banana, which peaked at over 917k concurrent users, because a) it is more of an app for speculations rather than a game (people keep it launched for hours to get tradable cards) and b) it is unclear how many of those were bots; and games that reached their peak prior to 2024 (mostly Early Access graduates like Sons of the Forest and V Rising).
- Black Myth: Wukong — 2.4 million CCU
- Palworld — 2.1 million CCU
- Helldivers 2 — 458.7k CCU
- Marvel Rivals (free-to-play) — 444.2k CCU
- Throne and Liberty (free-to-play) — 336.3k CCU
- The First Descendant (free-to-play) — 264.8k CCU
- Last Epoch — 264.7k CCU
- Once Human (free-to-play) — 231.6k CCU
- Dragon’s Dogma 2 — 228.5 CCU
- Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 — 225.6k CCU
Such a strong start also helped Marvel Rivals become the 25th most played product on Steam of all time by this metric, ranking right between Among Us (458.7k CCU) and Sons of the Forest (414.2k CCU). It would rank 23rd when excluding Banana and the Monster Hunter Wilds beta.
Developed by NetEase’s team in Seattle, Marvel Rivals had a couple of playtests this year, with its closed beta peaking at over 52k concurrent players on Steam in July.