Is Marvel Rivals worthy of an esports scene?

Marvel Rivals is the success story that the industry of live service games was searching for, but breaching into the esports crowd is a different matter entirely.

Analysing the game’s success in the world of free-to-play titles is relatively simple — one look at Steam Charts and the numbers speak for themselves: in a little over three months of existence, the game already has peaked at more than 600,000 concurrent players and has an average of more than 200,000 people playing at any given moment just on PC.

The reason for this success is taking popular characters from a multi-billion dollar franchise and dropping them into a fast-paced multiplayer shooter. And while the game is quite similar to Overwatch 2, it has solidified itself in the hero shooter space thanks to its responsive developer team and frequent updates. But while these are qualities of a good casual game, will it carry into a successful esports scene?

The popularity of the Marvel Rivals benefited a lot from a downward period (now possibly over with the latest revamp) of the Overwatch 2 ecosystem both on the casual and competitive front. Many disgruntled players, content creators and professionals made the jump from one hero shooter to the other to take advantage of the popularity of the latest release.

As a result, the nascent competitive ecosystem of Marvel Rivals is almost entirely composed of former Overwatch pros, in a very similar fashion to the early days of VALORANT, where the entirety of the top players’ crowd was made by former Counter-Strike professionals.

That’s the exact road the Armenia-based Russian organisation Virtus Pro went for its debut in the nascent competitive scene: its newly signed Marvel Rivals roster is composed of William ‘SparkR’ Andersson, Philip ‘phi’ Handke, Mikkel ‘Sypeh’ Klein, Arthur ‘dridro’ Szanto and Andreas ‘Nevix’ Karlsson, all former Overwatch 2 pros that used to compete as part of TeamCats. 

What granted them the spot in the organisation is their victory at the very first EU Marvel Rivals Championship, called Season 0, that’s now about to come back with Season 1 and a multi-region and multi-input competition. Starting on March 8th, teams will compete in the Marvel Rivals Championship Season 1 divided between China PC, North America PC, North America Console, Europe PC, Europe Console, Asia PC and Asia Console regions, each one having a prize pool of $14,500 (~£11,600).

With the esports scene heating up, Sentinels and other top esports organisations have followed suit, announcing teams for the Invitationals, which featured region-based tournaments late 2024 to early March. The most-watched Invitational was North America, with an okay 18,000 peak viewers.

So the interest in the game from the industry and the players is there, but is it going to be enough for the rise of a sustainable ecosystem? As things stand right now, the answer leans more on the no than on the yes side, mainly because of what the roadmap is for the NetEase shooter.

First of all, Marvel Rivals launched with 33 heroes, a massive amount for a hero shooter, with four more (the Fantastic Four) having made their debut in the first season alone. This is not just a launch period bonanza: adding at least two heroes every two to three months is the developer’s plan to keep interest and player population high.

The problem with this strategy, and the main complaint of the playerbase, is that heroes feel samey in the way they look, but especially in the way they play. A lot of shooting and cooldown abilities feel very similar to each other, with the problem only getting worse as the Fantastic Four made their appearance. Adding to the fact that some characters are almost carbon copies of Overwatch characters (Venom-Wrecking Ball and Captain America-Brigitte, for example) and there could be a problem of repetitiveness.

The community is also dissatisfied with the maps of the game, which are perceived as too few and with destructible environments that do not belong in a high level competitive game. Some technical issues still plague the PC version and most of the viewership so far (on Twitch and Youtube according to Esports Charts) has come from big names like Felix ‘xQc’ Lengyel and Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek playing the game around the time of launch.

The playerbase, however, shows no signs of shrinking and all of the above problems (except from the hero design one, which would need a radical rethink) are solvable considering the massive profits generated by the game. Bloomberg reports $200 million in revenue so far for NetEase, with 40 million unique users since launch. 

But this seems to not be enough: the CEO of the company slashed the entire North American division and lamented astronomical licensing fees for the Disney IP that he almost didn’t approve, pushing the developer to use original design and leading to months of wasted work.

Marvel Rivals has the popularity going for it  but not the competitiveness — so it’s not quite ready for a successful and big esports scene. But there’s potential — especially with NetEase attempting to support esports initiatives. There’s a lot of interest and an active player base, but the game still has to figure out many strategic processes that are needed for an esports ecosystem to be attractive, sustainable and profitable.