Marvel Rivals is still going strong, but its playerbase isn’t quite reaching the heights it used to. Now, even the launch of Season 3 hasn’t been enough to bring back its lapsed players, as it debuts to almost half of the concurrent users on Steam than Season 2 did back in April.
In fact, the Season 3 update even brought in fewer concurrent players than the Season 2.5 update towards the end of May. So, while the new season has given the playerbase a boost, we’re still seeing a downward trend from the big numbers we saw close to launch.
Marvel Rivals Is Doing Great, But Season 3’s Launch Is Much Smaller Than Season 2’s
Looking at the graph on SteamDB, we can see that Season 2’s launch peaked at 315,196 concurrent PC players on April 12. The mid-season update brought this down to 190,368, and now, Season 3 has launched to a high of 163,232.
While this player count is still enough for Marvel Rivals to comfortably make it one of the most played games on Steam over the weekend, it is an incredibly significant season-to-season drop. Worse yet, Season 2 saw the game slip to mixed reviews on Steam, as players were dissatisfied by the state of the game and the meta. The reviews are still mixed at the time of writing, with ongoing complaints about matchmaking.
Speaking from first-hand experience, this does still seem to be an issue, as it’s either steamroll or be steamrolled in competitive. Many players believe that this is because Marvel Rivals doesn’t have a placement matches system, in which you have to play a bunch of matches before you’re given a rank. Instead, everyone is sent down a few ranks whenever there’s a reset, and has to climb back up – but this means that lower ranks are currently full of players who are lower ranks, or who used to be much higher.
At the very least, Season 3’s launch did cause another spike in players, so there are still a good number of people coming back for more, even if they tune out towards the end of a season. We will just have to wait and see if Season 3’s offerings are enough to cling onto more players this time around, or if we’ll see another dip by the time Season 4 is with us.
Marvel Rivals
- Released
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December 6, 2024
- ESRB
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T For Teen // Violence
- Developer(s)
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NetEase Games
- Publisher(s)
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NetEase Games
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5
