For nearly a decade, Overwatch has dominated hero shooters, which set the gold standard for such games, as Blizzard’s 2016 hit title defined the genre, not just popularized it among the mainstream audience. Even though its dicey transition to Overwatch 2 and cancellation of its promised PvE campaign, the title has sat comfortably on the throne among all hero shooters that existed at the time.
Then came Marvel Rivals, crashing through the gate like Hulk with a billion-dollar Marvel IP on its back, a Chinese developer with all the right ammunition to dominate the genre, and a promise of playing as your favorite heroes and villains, that too, for free. It had everything that Overwatch lacked: a fresh start, a third-person perspective, destructible environments, and the biggest IP on the planet that is already a success in most media, even gaming.
NetEase, with its chest puffed out in late 2024, promised a title that would finally dethrone Overwatch and dominate the hero shooter with a breath of fresh air. The launch was electric, there were queues to play the closed alpha and beta tests, and everything looked optimistic. But as we close out 2025, the reality is starkly different. The game didn’t just fail to kill Overwatch; it rather sped through the exact mistakes that Blizzard took years to make, proving that even a shiny coat of Marvel paint cannot hide a foundational misunderstanding of what it takes to keep a hero shooter alive in the long run.
Marvel Rivals Was the Hot Rebound, and Everyone Forgot ‘That’ Ex Over-night
The hype cycle for Marvel Rivals was manufactured for perfection, but the community buy-in was genuine. Thousands of players tuned in to closed beta streams for an access code and played hundreds of hours even before the game launched to have an early advantage with the game’s meta. And when it finally launched in December 2024 as a free-to-play title, we saw a mass exodus of content creators who had built their entire careers on Overwatch (like Flats) suddenly jumping ship to become a Rivals pro.
Creators evangelized Rivals and praised the chaos of a 6v6 format, the synergy of Team-Up abilities, and the simple joy of playing a game where the devs seemed to be listening, something that Overwatch had been missing in the sequel title since its launch. It showed everyone that the grass wasn’t just greener on the other side. Rather, it was vibrant, destructible, and featured your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man having a team-up synergy with the nutty Squirrel Girl (a character even I didn’t know of before this game).
The game also introduced some offbeat Marvel characters like Jeff the Land Shark and Luna Snow that players were unaware of, but still adored them as if they had been reading about them for years. For that brief window in late 2024 to early 2025, Overwatch 2 looked like a relic. Rivals hit a peak of over 600K concurrent players in Jan 2025, numbers that Blizzard would actually kill for now.
For a brief window, Marvel Rivals felt like the genre’s next evolution rather than a challenger. But as we soon learned, “fun” is a finite resource when the cracks in the foundation start to show.
Rivals Took a Gwen Stacy Dive, and the Player Count Never Recovered
The crash of Marvel Rivals’ player count wasn’t immediate, but it was more of a slow burn over time that could be best defined as brutal. The decline began after the launch of Season 2, which brought the infamous Hellfire Gala to the game, and this is when the “new game smell” evaporated. Players were left with the reality of NetEase’s live service model, expensive skins in the shop, event passes that demanded that “premium” access to get rewards, and content that started to feel like unnecessary bloat.
The player count cratered as we watched CCU numbers drop by over 50% in a matter of weeks. The parallel to Overwatch here was painful as it is. The OG hero shooter bled players for the opposite reason, where the game felt volatile and inconsistent. On the other hand, Rivals’ Season 2 introduced some controversial nerfs and buffs that hit popular heroes like Doctor Strange and Spider-Man quite hard and alienated casual players who just wanted to play as their favorite Avenger and dominate a quick match lobby.
The competitive integrity also fell apart under the weight of smurfing, and its ranked system felt highly unrewarding, and only demanded endless grind for that coveted Celestial badge. On the flipside, Overwatch 2’s player count slowly started rising in Summer 2025 as players had nowhere else to go, and content creators soon realised there’s no place like home after some of that post “squirrel nut” clarity.
Meanwhile, NetEase laid off their entire North American team and GuangGuang and his team over at China were fighting to get the player count back up with Dev Vision episodes, a constant stream of updates, and bloating the hero roster with a new hero every month, which suddenly felt like content overload. I mean, NetEase literally took two entire seasons to introduce The Fantastic Four heroes who could have easily been released in a single season altogether (all thanks to Feige trying to send fans into cinemas to watch the new film).
The only blip of hope came recently in October with the release of the Marvel Zombies mode. It was a desperate but successful play. The introduction of a PvE horde mode featuring bosses like Zombie Namor spiked the player count back up to respectable six-figure numbers. But this success is a band-aid. It proved that players love the Marvel IP and PvE content, which is exactly what Overwatch 2 promised and failed to deliver.
NetEase Is Dodging Bullets With New Heroes Instead of Actually Igniting the Battle
Even with new gameplay modes and events like the Rivals’ Day 2025, NetEase is actually making the same mistakes as Overwatch. The content bloat we talked about earlier, even though it’s actually sort of killing the game, isn’t even the biggest issue behind its declining player count.
The real poison in the well is the controversy surrounding Skill-Based Matchmaking (SBMM). Throughout 2025, the Rivals community has been in an uproar about Engagement Optimized Matchmaking. Players and pros alike feel the matches are rigged to keep you grinding rather than to provide a fair fight. It creates a cynical relationship between the player and the game. You don’t feel like you lost because you got outplayed. You feel like you lost because the algorithm decided it was your turn to lose.
Pros are already pointing out the structural cracks. The map designs are too open for a competitive shooter, and the visual clutter makes high-level play a headache. The game does not know if it wants to be a casual party brawler or an esport, so it fails at both.
If NetEase actually wants to be the undisputed king of hero shooters with Marvel Rivals, rather than just remaining as that seasonal event game which only delivers around a special game mode or flavor of the month, they need to make a pivot, and that too, immediately. The roster needs to stay limited, as we don’t need another Vanguard or Support hero every other season. We need a reason to trust the game. Overwatch survived beneath the frustration among players because its 5v5 gameplay was polished to a mirror shine.
Meanwhile, Rivals is still brawling with its own weight, masquerading as a tactical shooter, where it really needs to boast the potential it has to become a competitive sport. But until NetEase continues to stuff down all that Marvel IP has to offer down its players’ throats and fix all the matchmaking issues alongwith the visual clutter, the undisputed crown of hero shooters is still with Overwatch.
Ishan Adhikary
