NetEase’s free-to-play superhero shooter Marvel Rivals continues to perform extremely well. Its launch month was already great, having registered over 20 million players across all platforms, but the debut of Season 1 has pushed it even further. A few hours ago, the game pulverized its prior concurrency record (480K players) on Steam, setting a new peak at 644K online players on Valve’s platform, according to SteamDB.
The first season began just two days ago with the arrival of the Fantastic Four: Mister Fantastic (who has been assigned to the Duelist class in the game), Human Torch (also a Duelist), the Thing (Vanguard), and the Invisible Woman (Strategist). The addition of these highly popular Marvel characters, who are soon getting their own movie in the MCU, is sure to be a big reason for the further surge in popularity.
But there’s more. The developers have added an all-new game mode titled Doom Match. Here, 8 to 12 players battle on a single map, each belonging to a different faction, and all factions are hostile to each other. Players earn points by knocking out enemies, and at the end of the match, the top 50% of players by default is considered the winning side.
Season 1 also introduced a seasonal event called Midnight Features. Players can complete the seasonal activities to unlock limited-time rewards, including exclusive galleries, costume, spray, unit, nameplate, and more. Starting yesterday, Twitch users may even unlock exclusive Drop rewards, such as the Hela: Will of Galacta spray, nameplate, and costume, and more.
Needless to say, Season 1 came with its own Battle Pass, which features more than twice the amount of content of the Season 0 pass, according to NetEase. The so-called Eternal Night Fall Luxury Battle Pass includes 10 costumes and their related content, such as sprays and emotes. The price for the Season 1 Luxury Battle Pass is set at 990 Lattice and players will receive 600 Lattice and 600 Units back by completing it. The good news is that the developers have introduced a mechanism for Battle Pass and Chrono Tokens that ensures that Luxury Battle Passes never expire. Moreover, Tokens purchased with Lattice are retained under certain conditions.
Lastly, the Chinese website Game Look shared an estimate of how much Marvel Rivals might have earned in its first month. They anticipated $54.5 million earned through Steam, $27.2 through PlayStation 5, and $2.7 through Xbox Series S|X. Considering that it’s also available on the Epic Games Store and through its own PC client, Game Look believes total earnings outside China were around $100 million. When factoring in the estimated earnings from the Chinese version of the game, the total goes up to $136 million. Should the game keep up this pace, it could turn into a franchise capable of earning over $1 billion per year, although that would be no small feat, since live service games often experience downturns in player interest.
By the way, Marvel Rivals can now be played via NVIDIA’s GeForce NOW cloud platform, and it has been confirmed that support for NVIDIA’s new DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation tech for GeForce RTX 50 graphics cards will be coming soon.
