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The past decade has been ruled by Marvel mania, with superheroes flooding the realms of film, TV, toys, merchandise, and IRL events. Video games have dabbled in superhero IP since the medium’s origins, but until now there have been few Marvel-backed video games that have found success on live-streaming platforms.
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Game publisher NetEase hoped to change this with the release of Marvel Rivals: A PVP Hero Shooter in the style of Overwatch and Concord. In August, we looked at the pre-release hype for Marvel Rivals based on its Twitch Drops campaigns. Now that the game is out, it’s time to check out its performance on live streaming. In this article, we’re taking a look at Marvel Rivals’ debut performance, how it stacks up against other Hero Shooters, and how the live-streaming community has engaged with the new title.
The game had an incredible debut performance. In its first week alone, Marvel Rivals generated 20M hours watched with a peak viewership of 301K. This performance matches up with the number of players who jumped on to try out the F2P title. The initial concurrent player count hit 444K on Steam alone, and on the 17th of December Marvel Rivals’ official X account announced that 20M players had already signed up. At the time of writing, the game even has an 80% positive rating on Steam – an incredible feat for a big-IP live service game in just its first month.
Marvel Rivals is currently in “Season 0”, still getting everything right before the official first season kicks off in January. But with 33 playable heroes and multiple game modes, there’s been plenty to attract players and viewers alike. A key part of Marvel Rivals’ appeal is the prevailing sentiment that the game is a great option for Overwatch fans who feel disenchanted with the direction Overwatch 2 took compared to the series’ roots. No doubt this has helped the game tap into a pre-existing community of Hero Shooter fans and build momentum quickly.
Among the streamers immediately taking to the game, one stood out. Necros brought in 3.3M hours watched of Marvel Rivals content in its opening week alone – 1/6th of the game’s entire viewership over that period! Second place Flats didn’t even come close to this total with just 717K hours watched. Necros’ success was largely due to his incredibly high airtime of 168 hours, proving his dedication to the cause with a higher airtime than any other streamer in the top 50. Other big name streamers also checked out Marvel Rivals, including xQc (276K) and TimTheTatman (442K).
Twitch chat provides great insight into which characters are stirring up the most discourse online. Across Marvel Rivals streams, Storm was the most mentioned character with 279K chat mentions in the game’s debut week. However, Storm is a commonly used word and so this figure may be inflated (see here for more detail). The most popular characters are more likely from the Thor and Spider-Man franchises, with Thor himself having 219K chat mentions and Venom having 139K chat mentions. Characters who are already emerging as S-Tier choices for competitive play also ranked highly, such as Hela (139K) and Mantis (64K).
Of course given their presence in the Marvel films and other media, many classic heroes like Hulk (104K) and Iron Man (48K) also had high chat mentions. What’s more exciting is how lesser-known characters have taken the spotlight since Marvel Rivals’ release, such as Peni Parker and Adam Warlock, whose chat mentions jumped by 24.3x and 23.1x, respectively. The other big winner in this respect was oddball inclusion Jeff the Land Shark with a 22.4x jump in chat mentions, creating drama as one of the more contentious inclusions in the game over other beloved Marvel characters.
An essential part of any live service game launch is a spectacular Twitch Drops event which rallies the community together via live streaming. Marvel Rivals is no exception, currently hosting a month-long Twitch Drops event that runs throughout Season 0 and features four rewards based on how long viewers tune in to Twitch Drops-enabled streams (listed here). Almost all of the aforementioned streamers have participated in this event, including Necros with four Twitch Drops-enabled streams.
By looking at the watchtime of Unique Registered Viewers (URVs) tuning in to Twitch Drops-enabled streams, we can determine the proportion of Marvel Rivals fans fully engaging with the event. Among the 4.9M URVs who tuned into Twitch-Drops enabled streams, just 13.4% (664K) watched for long enough in the game’s debut week to (potentially) obtain every Twitch Drops reward. With the event still running, this number will of course likely rise in the coming days. Still, 13.4% of all URVs engaging with four hours or more of Marvel Rivals content on Twitch is an impressive figure!
On the flip side, 62% of URVs didn’t even watch long enough to be able to claim a single Twitch drops reward. This majority of the group may be composed of many different demographics. Firstly, fans of streamers who participated in the event may not like Marvel Rivals, and opted not to watch this content. Secondly, there may be Marvel Rivals players who wanted the Drops, but don’t enjoy live streaming enough to participate. Lastly, there are curious onlookers considering buying Marvel Rivals who tried watching the game, but lost interest. Of these, NetEase would want to attract potential new players from among the first and third groups in particular.
Marvel Rivals’ direct competition comes from other live service Hero Shooters, due to the strong similarity in gameplay and the general “stickiness” of these titles (with fans rarely migrating from their staple live service game to a new title). Looking at historical peak viewerships for Hero Shooters, Marvel Rivals comes in 6th with its peak of 301K viewers. This is a strong performance for such a packed genre featuring heavyweights such as Riot’s VALORANT (3.1M) and Blizzard’s Overwatch (1.8M). Given more time to build a fanbase and begin hosting esports events, Marvel Rivals could easily rank among these other titles in the future.
But perhaps Marvel Rivals should be thinking more about other new entrants to the scene which may shake up the landscape completely. Upcoming Hero Shooters like Valve’s Deadlock (223K) and Theorycraft Games’ SUPERVIVE (214K) are already pulling in massive peak viewerships from demos and beta builds alone. Additionally, these games are innovating within the genre which means more potential to take over as tastemakers from the older precedent set by Overwatch.
Longevity is the key to success with live service games. With the massive budget, deep backlog of IP, and positive initial reception, Marvel Rivals could go the distance – but it needs to continue to innovate and define itself beyond comparisons to Overwatch. Only by proving itself as a fantastic game irrespective of its ties to Marvel will Marvel Rivals endure into the future. Stream Hatchet will be watching as contenders in the Hero Shooter space emerge in 2025.
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The importance of influencer marketing for reaching gamers
Indie publishers struggle to get noticed. While publishers
Film and TV adaptations of popular game franchises
