With marred fame, Marvel Rivals was a live-service title on the verge of doom until recently, when the new Halloween-themed update saw its player base get a sudden conversion, with concurrent players on Steam almost doubling. The immediate and dramatic infusion of players simply arose from the introduction of the much-anticipated, albeit temporary, Zombies co-op PvE mode. Apparently, this made for the much-needed content injection to bring back a horde of frustrated players to the superhero shooter.
Concerning months on end were a downward trajectory for the hero shooter from NetEase Games. After flourishing post-launch, the Steam player count had suffered a drop of about 86 percent by the time August 2024 rolled around. The bleeding months were attributed to a mix of performance and balancing issues along with poor tweaking of core matchmaking systems. Zombies mode breaks the mold by putting four players against waves of undead monsters culminating in tough boss fights with characters such as the Queen of the Dead and UNdead Namor, an unexpected success. The option of character building within matches with upgrades really resonated positively with the community.
The Zombies mode has certainly been cheered on by the player base, yet the exuberance is diluted by the fact that it is slated, as of now, to run only until November 13. Yet the update also brings with it other rewards for the players and includes events offering the Blade Knight costume entirely for free as a reward for other missions. Moreover, NetEase continues to roll with an important quality-of-life feature, cross-progression. Right now in limited Early Access for approved testers, it is on track to roll out with all users with the launch of Season 5 in November.
The new spike, driving concurrent beyond 120K, gives the NetEase team a clear way to ensure that meaningful traction is achieved, suggesting quite strongly that, even if for a limited time, resolving the issues with the PvE environment should take precedence if they intend to somehow realize the resurrection of the trust of the players. The challenge for the developer is to evaluate with some precision the facets that have aided the success of the Zombies mode and how, moving forward, to effectively create a stable approach for embedding new and exciting forms of engagement into the overarching content strategy.
