Marvel Rivals dev on why Rivals succeeded and Concord failed – “it didn’t bring any unique value”

Marvel Rivals has taken the world by storm as the new superhero multiplayer game sucks up over 10 million gamers in just a few days. Coming just months after Sony’s hero shooter Concord, which was killed just days after its lukewarm release, Marvel Rivals game director Thaddeus Sasser felt cautious releasing another free-to-play hero shooter into the ether.

Speaking on the VideoGamer Podcast before Rivals’ launch, Sasser was asked about the shock death of PlayStation’s multiplayer release. Unlike Rivals’ branded superhero formula, the game director argued that Concord “didn’t bring any unique value” to players that would get them to move from games such as Overwatch.

Marvel Rivals game director on Concord’s “switching cost”

In the interview, Sasser argued that Concord didn’t have enough unique value to attract people from Overwatch or similar games.

“There’s a switching cost,” the director said. “I’ve already invested in Overwatch, I’ve got 15 skins for Pharah, I’m not going anywhere.”

In the current market, which has seen studios close, games cancelled and titles review-bombed, capturing the crowd early on in a game’s cycle is key, but it’s still not a guaranteed success. Despite Rivals having a huge Discord community, and some stacked closed beta sessions prior to its launch, Sasser remained cautious about reading too much into the early green shoots.

“As a game developer you’re always worried until the audience has responded,” he said. “The truth is that I don’t think anybody can accurately predict this or the game industry would be radically different today. There’s a lot of games that come out that people are like ‘it’s going to do well’ then it flops or people come out and go ‘it’s going to flop’ and it succeeds amazingly. So, I think it’s really hard to tell ahead of time and you’re always worried about that.

There’s a lot of games that come out that people are like ‘it’s going to do well’ then it flops or people come out and go ‘it’s going to flop’ and it succeeds amazingly.

Thaddeus Sasser

“I think the trick is that you need to have that reason that people want to come and play your game and I think Marvel Rivals does that exactly with the superhero. I dont know about you, but when I heard the concept of the game I was like ‘Oh my God I want to go be Storm in a game’, ‘I want to go be Doctor Strange in a game’. I want to be those heroes in the game, that sounds awesome. And of course my mind immediately leapt to all the cool possibilities you could have with that. That’s what I think will pull people in as well too. If we’ve done our jobs well, they’ll love what they play an they’ll want to play some more.”

With the launch period out of the way, it’s clear that Marvel Rivals’ developers have done their jobs well after all. Ten million players and hundreds of thousands of concurrent gamers are all battling heroes and villains across the multiverse, and there’s no sign of stopping. As new patch notes drop for the game and leaked heroes show brand-new possibilities for players, Rivals is just starting an exciting new journey.