The past decade has been ruled by Marvel mania, with superheroes flooding the realms of film, TV, toys, merchandise, and IRL events. Video games have dabbled in superhero IP since the medium’s origins, but until now there have been few Marvel-backed video games that have found success on live-streaming platforms.
Game publisher NetEase hopes to change this with the upcoming release of Marvel Rivals: A hero PVP shooter in the style of Overwatch and Concord. Overwatch is a particularly apt comparison, given NetEase’s past experience with bringing Blizzard’s title to the Chinese market. Along with NetEase’s hero shooter credentials and past live-streaming successes like Once Human, Marvel Rivals looks set to impress upon its debut.
In this article, we’re taking a look at the pre-release hype for Marvel Rivals based on its recent Twitch Drops campaigns and getting a glimpse into which sections of the Marvel fanbase the game is most likely to appeal to when it comes out.
Marvel Rivals Strikes Out Into Live Streaming with Three Twitch Drops Campaigns
From the 25th of July to the 3rd of August, there were three separate rounds of Twitch Drops for Marvel Rivals that each offered viewers the chance to obtain a closed beta access key if they watched for at least 60 minutes. Twitch Drops campaigns are crucial to the success of a game’s marketing campaign, combining community events with influencer marketing.
In the case of Marvel Rivals, the Twitch Drops were a resounding success. Over the three rounds, 4.7M hours of Marvel Rivals content was watched with a peak viewership during the first event of 109K. The reward for all three rounds was the same – closed beta access keys – so it stands to reason that hours watched dropped for the second and third rounds by 52% and 37%, respectively. However, the average concurrent viewers still stayed relatively stable, only dropping by 28% between the first and second rounds of Twitch Drops.
With so many participating channels, it behooves publishers to observe which streamers fans turn to for content. In the case of Marvel Rivals, the most popular content creator during the Twitch Drops campaigns was xQc with an average minute viewership (AMA) of 24.6K.
However, there were multiple streamers who far outperformed xQc in terms of pure hours watched. Shroud generated 187K hours watched while still commanding a respectable AMA of 16.4K. Further down the list we have the ultra-devoted Marvel Rivals streamers who turned their full attention towards covering the game. Necros, for example, saw a whopping 543K hours watched out of his 96 hours of airtime. While celebrity streamers like xQc and Shroud may pull in big numbers for hyped streaming events, it will be more dedicated streamers like Necros, mL7support, and Emongg who are likely to stick around after the game’s release.
Twitch Chat Mentions Reveal the Hype for Different Marvel Rivals Heroes
The Twitch Drops events offered a fantastic way to bring the community together and gain some insights on their opinions about Marvel Rivals. Looking at chat mentions for the game’s title over the past three months, an incredible 177K mentions of “Marvel Rivals” were made on Twitch.
We can go further though, looking at the mentions of specific Marvel characters to gauge which heroes are garnering the most attention. Three leaders stand out at the top of the pack: Groot, Venom, and Hulk, with 62K, 57K, and 55K chat mentions, respectively, over the past three months. Groot’s absurdly high chat mention is most likely due to the meme of repeating the character’s name (much as the character themselves uses). Venom is an interesting one, with his play style drawing comparisons to Winston in Overwatch. All three characters are repeatedly featured near the top of speculative tier lists for Marvel Rivals.
Looking at chat mentions for characters that haven’t been announced as heroes in Marvel Rivals may offer some insight into who fans want to see in the game. The two most popular characters are Deadpool and Wolverine with 14K and 10K chat mentions each. However, their numbers are no doubt inflated by the recent box office success of the Deadpool & Wolverine movie. Beyond these two, the most popular characters are members of the original Avengers from the MCU: Hawkeye and Captain America, with 2.6K and 2.4K chat mentions, respectively.
It’s worth noting that Marvel Rivals is the definite primary driver behind chat mentions, with every character included in the game garnering more chat mentions than non-included characters (with a couple of rare exceptions).
Marvel Rivals Set to be the Most Popular Marvel Game on Live Streaming
As mentioned earlier, Marvel has had only a few big successes on live-streaming. In the past year, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 performed well with 21% of all Marvel game viewership, while the digital card game MARVEL SNAP dominated with half of all Marvel game viewership on live streaming. But amazingly, despite not having released yet, Marvel Rivals has already generated close to 15% of all Marvel game viewership over the past 12 months. This, combined with the live-streaming popularity of other hero shooters, is a clear indicator that the game will become Marvel’s flagship live streaming series upon its release.
Hopefully, Marvel Rivals will also help to diversify Marvel’s global reach. At the moment, looking at the past months again, two-thirds of all Marvel game viewership comes from English-speaking audiences (with European language-speakers following behind). Given the popularity of the hero shooter genre in other markets such as Asia and Africa, Marvel Rivals could break this trend. NetEase is also more-than-familiar with the Chinese market, perhaps providing a foothold for Marvel games in the region.
Still, Marvel Rivals faces fierce competition in the live streaming space from previously established shooters like Overwatch 2, VALORANT, and XDefiant. Splitting its audience with these titles after the initial hype dies down will be the true test of whether the game has staying power. Stream Hatchet will track the success of the game when it comes out in the coming year.
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