Marvel Rivals has frequently been declared an “Overwatch Killer” since its debut where it…very much copied Overwatch in many ways, but with Marvel characters and a third person view.
Now, there are concerns about the ultimate longevity of the series, and as of this moment, we have a rare instance where Overwatch 2 and Marvel Rivals are tied on Steam, not the primary Overwatch 2 platform, where Rivals has a much larger presence there.
The caveats are different regional timing and an Overwatch 2 season launch, to be sure. Rivals definitely outperforms Overwatch 2 on a daily basis there. But the gap is shrinking and Marvel Rivals is visibly losing steam quickly as the year presses on.
Marvel Rivals peaked in January of 2025 with 644,000 concurrent players a month after its December launch. Here in August 2025, while there have been bumps for season and character launches, its 24 hour peak today was 91,000. That’s an 85% decline in eight months.
I’m often scolded for talking about percent declines when it comes to games over time, but there are contexts for that. No, it doesn’t matter that a single-player, finish-able game loses 95% of its players eventually. But a live-service shooter with endless amounts of seasons planned losing 85% of its playerbase not even a year after release indicates some alarm bells should be going off at NetEase.
Overwatch 2, meanwhile, launched on Steam with 75,000 players in August of 2023. Today, this current increase has hit 53,000 concurrents a full two years later. You can see the difference.
Is Marvel Rivals doomed? No, I’m not saying that, but these are significant declines, which is the kind of thing you do not want to see in the highly competitive live multiplayer space where you need to establish longevity. Rivals’ “baseline” is still good, but we don’t actually know how far it may keep dropping from here. Rivals was heralded as a rare hit in an era of failed multiplayer game launches, and it is a hit, but this kind of drop needs a fix and apparently the answer is not just pumping out more characters, even recognizable ones like Blade and Jean Grey, now with others like Daredevil and Deadpool all the way. The game will need to look for a big turnaround moment if this continues, and I’m not sure that’s something like bikini skins, which has been a primary focus as of late. As of now, it seems like we haven’t hit the bottom yet.
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