Monster Hunter and Marvel Rivals player numbers plummet after initial success

Metro

4 days ago

After enjoying successful launches on PC, Monster Hunter Wilds and Marvel Rivals have been steadily losing players over the past few months.
Thanks to the success of games like Fortnite, video game publishers are obsessed with creating their own 'forever game'; something that people will keep playing and spending money on for many, many years after launch.
We've seen too many attempts at this crash and burn in less than a year because they failed to garner much of an audience. However, even the success stories – the ones that do prove immensely popular at launch – aren't able to rest on their laurels.
All too quickly, a once devoted player-base can turn on and abandon a game, even if it's generally considered to be good, as evidenced by recent downward trends affecting Monster Hunter Wilds and Marvel Rivals.
Monster Hunter Wilds is widely agreed to be the best game in the series and after its launch in February, it became the best selling new game of 2025.
The PC version attracted a larger player base than the last two entries, helping Steam break its peak concurrent users record, and its last reported sales figures stands at over 10 million, already making it Capcom's seventh best-selling game ever.
Only four months later though, and user reviews on Steam have taken a shocking downturn, with a swam of overly negative reviews shifting its *recent reviews* rating to 'Overwhelmingly Negative.'
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Glancing through recent examples, this is primarily a result of the game's performance on PC. Many describe it as being poorly optimised, which means unstable frame rates, muddy visuals, and the game simply not running as well as it should, even on high-end PCs.
This has led to a sharp decline in player count. While such a decline is inevitable, seeing how much it dropped in March alone is bound to have Capcom executives sweating.
While Monster Hunter Wilds isn't a live service game in the traditional sense, as support is unlikely to last more than a few years, but Capcom does want people playing it regularly, as evidenced by its post-game content, new paid DLC, and free post-launch updates that add new monsters and weapons.
Per SteamDB, Monster Hunter Wilds peaked at 1,384,608 players in early March and that number has now dwindled into the tens of thousands. At the time of writing, it has even less than that, at just 8,077 players. That's less than the current player count of 12,508 for the seven-year-old Monster Hunter: World.
As for Marvel Rivals, its drop in player count has been more gradual but, as you can see on the SteamDB chart, it has consistently lost players in between seasons, and each new season has been pulling less and less players back.
After peaking at 644,269 players, with the launch of season one, Marvel Rivals is past the midpoint of season two and it has less than 100,000 concurrent players.
It's recent user reviews on Steam are notably more mixed than Monster Hunter Wilds', but the negative reviews all mention similar complaints regarding poor and unbalanced matchmaking and a toxic community.
These sorts of issues won't be exclusive to the PC version either, so while there's no accurate way to check, it's not unreasonable to assume Marvel Rivals' active player base on consoles is also suffering. More Trending
Some will argue that Marvel Rivals' drop in player count is only natural and nothing to be concerned about. A lot of players will naturally lose interest as the hype wears off and a dedicated core player-base is cultivated.
But when the game had such a strong start, publisher NetEase Games is unlikely to be satisfied seeing hundreds of thousands of people abandon it. Especially since the game makes use of an extremely recognisable, and expensive to obtain, licence and is free to play, meaning it makes all its money through microtransactions.
Let's also not forget that even when Marvel Rivals was exploding in popularity, NetEase still laid off a number of staff from its design team, setting a grim portent for what could happen if the game starts failing to meet the company's expectations.
All this shows that while launching a popular live service game is very difficult, it's perhaps even more difficult to ensure it stays popular. Such games need to be frequently monitored and re-evaluated and simply pumping out new content isn't always enough to keep people interested.
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