Marvel Rivals has been an unequivocal success. The hero shooter launched with a staggeringly high player count, only to beat it a few weeks later when the game's first season dropped. It's also managed to retain those players better than every live-service title released in the last few years. The game has enough potential content for another 875 years, too, so don't expect it to slow down any time soon.
Only dealing 22 damage on your way to Celestial rank is still something none of us could even dream of achieving.
Rivals' success has, though, unfortunately, caused a knock-on effect on what is arguably its biggest competitor, Overwatch 2, with the Blizzard-developed hero shooter seeing an almost 40 percent drop in players since Rivals launched.
Using data from SteamDB, we found that in the three months leading up to Marvel Rivals' launch (September 5 to December 5), Overwatch 2 was enjoying an average player count of 33,738. In the seven or so weeks since Rivals was released, Overwatch 2's average player count has fallen to 20,565—a 39 percent drop.
For parity, the average player count for Overwatch 2 for each of the three months we...
