It has been observed that Marvel Rivals’ popularity is slowly dipping on Steam, and it could be because of these three reasons.

Upon release, NetEase Games’ Marvel Rivals quickly became a worldwide sensation, however, right now it is currently at its lowest active player count on Steam. The game indeed offers an exciting multiplayer experience but it is just not enough to keep the players hooked.

Statistics have revealed that there is a slow dip in Marvel Rivals‘ popularity (Image via NetEase Games)

There are several reasons behind this but the primary one has to be the fact that the game is constantly unbalanced. NetEase seems to love pleasing the fan base as it immediately rolls out nerfs and features hoping to convince players to continue playing the game, but it is clearly backfiring. Instead of focusing on fixing the core elements of the game, the studio seems to be interested in giving players more heroes and skins.

Marvel Rivals’ popularity is slowly dipping

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The statistics on SteamDB reveal that the current peak active player count of Marvel Rivals is around 186,000. Compared to its all-time peak of roughly 644,000 proves that there has been a slow dip in the game’s popularity. This is the first time this figure has reached so low and there are various reasons behind it.

First, NetEase Games seems to be over-pleasing its fanbase. Many video game developers are criticized for not listening to their fanbase, but NetEase seems to work on even the most unreasonable demands, which has made the game quite unbalanced.

The second problem has a lot to do with the first problem, as many good heroes are getting nerfed just because players can’t compete with them. Instead of strategic tuning, strong heroes are nerfed and as a result, the game has become unstable. This has forced players to uninstall the game as some have spent countless hours trying to understand the abilities and movements of certain heroes.

The technical issues on PC ruin the gaming experience

Marvel Rivals still has many unfixed optimization issues that are ruining the game (Image via NetEase Games)

This second problem of technical issues and glitches is quite understandable, but NetEase isn’t making much progress to fix this problem. Frequent crashes, stutters, and server instability have been prominent in the game since the beginning, however, the devs are entirely focused on adding new characters to the game. Right now, the game appears to be a shallow fan service and this could be disastrous in the future. The slow dip in the active player count is just the beginning and no flashy heroes could save it.

Being a PvP hero shooter, the game also has the problem of players instalocking the characters, which ruins the team composition in most matches. NetEase has confirmed that it will not implement a regular role queue or role lock system to fix this problem as its approach is quite different. The developers hope to create more heroes to provide players with more options, another strategy that could backfire in the future.