It’s hard to imagine how launch weekend could have possibly gone better for Marvel Rivals — the latest super-powered multiplayer sensation taking the world by storm. The free-to-play hero shooter has already wracked up 10 million players, had almost zero technical issues, and developers NetEase have made some incredibly smart design choices. Marvel Rivals has established itself as one of the most “player-friendly” hero shooters out there, and if that momentum keeps up, it could integrally change the landscape of live service games.
Perhaps the game’s biggest win so far is the flawless launch. Since Rivals released, it has had zero instances of the game going offline for maintenance, or servers at large crashing. That’s no small feat for any online game, let alone one that had ten million players over the weekend. Even in my own experience, I like played around 70 matches across the weekend, and had a single instance of a match crashing. On top of that matchmaking is seamless, almost always dropping you into a match within 5-10 seconds. It simply cannot be overstated how important these aspects are — a stellar launch combined with good word of mouth can really propel Rivals to success. It also means anyone interested in the game can literally jump in and be playing within five minutes. That’s huge, but it also ties into another thing the game does exceptionally well.
