While it hasn't quite reached Overwatch's pre-relaunch numbers, Marvel Rivals has managed to court a still very impressive 40 million players around the world.
Perhaps no game has lit quite so big a fire under Overwatch's heels as Marvel Rivals, a superhero shooter that remixes that same team-based formula with a third-person perspective. Since Marvel Rivals' 2024 launch, the two games have been compared endlessly and have arguably pushed each other in the right directions, and now, we finally have some solid stats.
Disney today revealed that Marvel Rivals "has attracted 40 million players worldwide" since its release. The company's executive vice president of video games, Sean Shoptaw, says the game is "a really good example of just how powerful and meaningful these worlds can be."
A whopping 60% of those 40 million players are also under the age of 24, according to Disney. "These are platforms where Gen Z [and] Gen Alpha primarily are spending a lot of their time, hanging out with their friends," Shoptaw adds.
A huge success, for sure, and definitely an indication of how important the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies have been in giving younger audiences an attachment to these comic book characters. But Blizzard Entertainment likely isn't sweating since, even before it made a free-to-play pivot, the original paid release of Overwatch sold upwards of 50 million copies. The lively game's population has probably grown in the years since it was made freely available to anyone with a modern console or PC, as well.
Blizzard hasn't given an update on Overwatch's player figures in years, but the candy-colored hero shooter did knock out a major comeback in January with a huge update that overhauled many parts of the game, added five new characters at once, and won back fans that fallen off since the first heydays of Overwatch. Blizzard also apparently became Xbox's top studio after Overwatch's overperformance.
