Marvel Rivals Isn't a Failure, But It Is a Ceiling
It was easy to imagine Marvel Rivals as the next great moment when China seizes a Western crown jewel and shows the West how it should be done. NetEase telegraphed ambition early, promising new heroes every six weeks, dropping the collective Western jaws to the floor. Yet the engagement response has been meh. It calls into question the Eastern content arms race altogether.
Rivals has settled ~1.7M DAU and ~6.5M MAUs. At some reasonable mARPU ranges for a cosmetics economy without RNG-based monetization, the run rates are shockingly sober, ranging from anywhere to $100M-$300M. After licensing fees, active marketing (!), and what I'm sure is an army of developers that rivals small countries, it's hard to imagine this game is anywhere close to profitable.
The interesting comparison sits with Overwatch. Although far from its peak, it has not collapsed in the wake of Marvel Rivals. Instead, Blizzard leaned into something the Chinese approach rarely prioritizes: productivity. Perks, the lightweight, in-round progression system, and Stadium, the roguelike economy layer, deliver meaningful retention through cheap stat changes (announcement; video). These features are not "content" in the traditional sense. They are multipliers on designer time, creating more retention per developer hour than any new hero could. Blizzard chose craft; NetEase chose scale.
Both decisions now run into the harder truth that the hero shooter resembles Match3 and the MOBA before it. The category has reached equilibrium. There is loyalty at the top, churn that recycles within the genre, and no new surface area left to capture. The next ten million players are not hiding behind a new character or a new map. They may not exist at all.
When a genre stops absorbing new ideas, it drifts into crisis. Designers keep pushing, but the gains are marginal, while publishers spend more, but the audience does not grow. That crisis is often the precursor to a paradigm shift. This is why the rush to build extraction shooters was and is so essential: new sub-genres are new surface areas and new opportunities to compete.
It's not fair to say that Marvel Rivals is a failure, but it is in an awkward middle age, and it's hard to imagine active users growing from here. Instead, it needs to face the struggle that nearly every Western shooter faces: how to monetize. And here is where NetEase made the greatest mistake, which is firmly planting the game's paradigm into the West. Meanwhile, I look across to Delta Force, which could give fewer shits, and it will be rewarded with obscene amounts of revenue.