NetEase's "Contention" is highly popular, while Blizzard's "Overwatch" is the last bastion | Focus Analysis
Text | Xue Dexing
Editor | Liu Shiwu
One month after its launch, NetEase's hero shooter game "Marvel Rivals" has completely become a hit.
The "big brother" with a similar gameplay type, "Overwatch 2" (abbreviated as OW2), has also recently started the internal test of the Chinese server and summoned old players to return. Whether it is the timing or the high overlap of the player groups, the two seem to be in conflict.
On December 8, "Marvel Rivals" attracted more than 10 million players within 72 hours after its release. According to SteamDB data, the total number of concurrent players on the same day exceeded 480,000, and this does not include data from other platforms such as Xbox. At the same time, the data of "Overwatch 2" is declining significantly, and the gap in popularity between the two games is getting wider.
Interestingly, in the early stages of the game's launch, a large number of Chinese server players gave "Marvel Rivals" a bad review and seemed not to be interested in this game. Now, due to the explosion of popularity in the overseas market, many people have begun to re-examine it.
One is produced by NetEase, and the other is agented by NetEase. Will the two games confront each other or achieve mutual benefit and win-win results?
"Marvel Rivals" One Month After Launch: Popular in Foreign Servers, "Really Good" in Chinese Server
In the first few days after its launch, "Marvel Rivals" had a mediocre response in China, and the attention it received on video platforms such as Bilibili and Douyin was not high.
In terms of user reviews, it could only get 20%-30% positive reviews in the Chinese region of Steam, and criticisms such as poor optimization, poor matching mechanism, and poor combat feel were endless. However, after a month, the evaluation gradually rose to a mixed 56%.
The early reviews of the Steam Chinese region were not optimistic about the launch.
In contrast to the domestic atmosphere, the reaction of foreign server players seems to be overly enthusiastic.
The global player count of the game reached 10 million within 72 hours of its launch, and it exceeded 20 million one week later. Its popularity on the live streaming platform Twitch is also not low, ranking third in the game list during prime time, surpassing "VALORANT" and GTA5, showing a strong momentum. In terms of evaluation, the game's positive review rate in the English region has also been maintained at around 80%.
The competition between "Marvel Rivals" and "Overwatch 2" is also inevitably discussed by players. After the release of the first season "Nightfall" of "Marvel Rivals" on January 10, the peak number of concurrent players on the Steam platform reached 644,000, setting a new record, far exceeding the best result of "Overwatch 2" on this platform.
In contrast, the days of "Overwatch 2" are not so good. According to the data from steamchart, in the past 7 days, the viewership of "Marvel Duel" has remained stable at 84,000, while the average viewership of "Overwatch 2" is only about 15,000, which has decreased by 2 times compared to the previous two months and is still declining.
Looking back, the popularity and evaluation of "Marvel Rivals" in China have also shown a significant upward trend. The popularity of many related videos of "Marvel Rivals" has increased significantly compared to before.
Although it is not certain whether the publicity and distribution path of "Marvel Rivals" is the right choice or a lucky guess, the first choice is to invest publicity and distribution resources in the European and American markets where the Marvel IP has a huge influence, and finally it can use the popularity of the foreign market to feed back to the domestic market. It has achieved a beautiful turnaround in a short period of time, which is worthy of in-depth thinking in the industry.
The popularity of the "Marvel Rivals" Chinese server on Little Black Box and Bilibili has greatly increased.
"Has the Familiar Feeling Returned?" Compared to OW, What Are the Advantages of "Rivals"?
"Marvel Rivals" can shine in the international market for a reason.
From the game gameplay to the character skills, and to the map scenes, "Marvel Rivals" has drawn on the "big brother" "Overwatch" in many places. When "Marvel Rivals" was first revealed, many old players, including overseas players, thought that this might be an OW substitute with a "Marvel skin".
But why do overseas players choose "Marvel Rivals" now instead of the more "long-established" "Overwatch 2"? After all, for them, "Overwatch 2" has always been playable.
Perhaps we can find the answers to this question from both sides.
A video mocking OW circulating on foreign websites.
From the perspective of "Marvel Rivals", the first point is not to underestimate the influence of the IP.
The popularity of the Marvel IP in the European and American markets is no less than that of the Three Kingdoms or Journey to the West in the hearts of domestic players, and it has considerable potential for combat adaptation. Since its development in the 1930s, Marvel Comics has created many superhero images such as Captain America, Spider-Man, and Iron Man, with a wide audience. The emergence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has further pushed this influence globally.
Since "Iron Man" in 2008, the MCU series of films have achieved huge box office success worldwide and have become a cultural phenomenon. Elements such as the lines and character images in the movies are widely quoted and imitated in daily life.
Many new foreign server players are not the player group of OW-like games, but are attracted by the Marvel IP and the pure American comic style of the game, hoping to be a "superhero" in the game.
As The Gamer, a foreign media, pointed out, "Players flocked to the beta version of 'Rivals' just to have Spider-Man face off against Magneto or have the Hulk team up with Storm... The popularity of the intellectual property helped 'Rivals' gain a foothold."
And traditional games that provide this kind of role-playing experience are deeply mired in the "DEI" (aiming at diversity, equity, and inclusion) quagmire. Due to the increasingly intense trend of political correctness, too many American local manufacturers, in order to cater to the trend of diversity, have designed the originally "beautiful" or handsome superheroes to be unattractive, and even players think they are deliberately uglifying the characters.
A black blogger, J The Concept, compared the character art of "Marvel Rivals" with another Marvel IP game, "Marvel's Avengers Alliance", and mentioned: "Since these character uglification incidents began to occur, the Eastern market has quietly risen. Since they (referring to European and American manufacturers) cannot give players what they want, then we will do it for them."
A tweet with tens of millions of views on X comparing the art differences between "Marvel Rivals" and "Marvel's Avengers Alliance".
In this situation, NetEase's "Marvel Rivals" instead provides European and American players with "more visually comfortable" superhero characters and stands out among a group of Marvel game characters affected by DEI.
In addition, "Marvel Rivals" indeed (in the words of the former Blizzard president) "cloned" part of OW, but it also has many new things of its own.
For example: changing from first-person shooting to third-person shooting, allowing players to see the Marvel heroes they control; modifying the details of the cart-pushing gameplay, so that driving does not require players to stay around; introducing the scene destruction mechanism and hero combo gameplay, making hero skills more diverse and "overpowered", and the combat rhythm and experience will be more enjoyable; it is also more liberal with hero strength and matching mechanism, does not always emphasize the importance of teamwork, and does not lock the player's character type, reducing the matching time.
From the official website of "Marvel Rivals".
We can feel that these new changes are developing in the direction of "being fun", trying to reduce the players' "sense of imprisonment" and meet the experience of entertainment players. These practices may also have learned from the lessons of the OW predecessors.
Returning to the problems on the OW side, it has left many lessons.
"Overwatch 2" has been constantly in the spotlight since its debut at the end of 2022. First is the sin of sloth. The PVE mode promised at the BlizzCon was delayed again and again, and finally it was simply announced to be cancelled, disappointing many old players.
Secondly is the sin of greed. The business model is too ugly, giving people the feeling of being eager to cash in, which is very unfriendly to players.
After the game version was changed, the new hero was bound to the advanced battle pass. Free-to-play players need to play for a long time to get a new hero to play. Previously free game parts have now become commercial content, ranging from a $20 skin to a $7 accessory, and even the hard-to-come-by PVE content later is a $15 DLC paid content.
In addition, there are various outrageous operational operations and occasional outbursts from the management, so that when Blizzard launched OW2 on the Steam platform in August 2023, it achieved a flood of bad reviews in less than two days.
Players gave OW2 120,000 bad reviews in the early stage of launching on Steam.
The Chinese server players of "Overwatch" are the ones who have been hurt the most. Because Blizzard announced the termination of the contract with NetEase at the beginning of 2023, the data resources of the Chinese server accounts were all frozen. Even if Chinese server players who want to persist can play the international server by using a VPN, they still need a mobile phone number from Hong Kong or Taiwan.
So that after the appearance of "Marvel Rivals", many players play it simply because they hope that their support for "Marvel Rivals" can spur or even attack Blizzard. After all, as long as the operation of "Marvel Rivals" appears to be slightly more normal, it has already won too much over OW2.
The Last Bastion? What Is the Prospect of OW2 Chinese Server
In view of the original player loss and the recent strong competition of "Marvel Rivals" in the international server, for Blizzard Entertainment, which has been constantly facing internal and external problems in recent years, the return of the OW2 Chinese server may be a lifeline.
If we observe carefully, we can find that "Marvel Rivals" is still far less popular in China than it is in the global market. The global sales data of January 11 on Little Black Box shows that even though "Marvel Rivals" has been able to rank first in global regions including the UK and the US, its best result in China is only fourth. Similarly, some domestic players think that "Rivals" "has a sense of a mobile game", and they think that OW2 is still strong in game texture and design, so in fact, the OW2 Chinese server is not without a fighting chance.
So, will it win?
Let's take a look at the reservation situation in the distance: As of the time of publication, the number of reservation players for the OW2 Chinese server across the entire network has exceeded two million. Although the true gold content of these two million is yet to be known, the influence of "Overwatch" as the nostalgic card of many old players should not be underestimated.
The reservation interface of the Chinese server official website.
From NetEase's perspective, after all, "Marvel Rivals" is one of the direct competitors of OW2, and as the agent of the OW2 Chinese server, the relationship is indeed somewhat delicate.
In fact, the proportion of NetEase's revenue from agenting Blizzard games is very low, and the impact on the performance level is small. NetEase itself also mentioned in its financial report earlier that the contribution percentage of net income and net profit from agenting games in 2021 and the first nine months of 2022 is a low single-digit, and it will not have a significant impact on the company's financial performance.
For NetEase, agenting Blizzard games may be more related to potential factors such as IP influence and brand value; for Activision Blizzard, Microsoft's acquisition has ended, and the momentum of the Blizzard series in the group is much weaker than that of the Activision series. It is still unknown what new tricks OW2 can come up with next.