2024 has proven to be a very bad year for publishers launching new live service games, with big titles like XDefiant, Concord, and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League all failing to find an audience. This week's release of Marvel Rivals might just have bucked the trend, however, as the superhero shooter has already claimed one of the biggest free-to-play launches in Steam history.
Marvel Rivals reached a peak of 444,286 concurrent players on Steam shortly after its launch last night, as SteamDB shows. Obviously that doesn't even include players on console or those using the standalone PC launch, but purely in terms of Steam releases, that's the second-biggest-launch for a brand-new free-to-play game ever, behind only the MMO Lost Ark, which reached a staggering 1,325,305 concurrent players day one on Valve's platform.
