Marvel Rivals hits 10 million players in 72 hours, adding to NetEase's growing live service portfolio

NetEase has shared the first figures for its new free-to-play hero shooter Marvel Rivals. The game’s launch has turned out to be successful.

Marvel Rivals has reached 10 million players globally in just 72 hours since its December 6 launch, according to NetEase. This includes those who downloaded the game on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and through the official website. It is unclear how the audience is split between platforms.

“We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you,” the company said in a statement.

🎉 In just 72 hours, we’ve reached an incredible milestone of 10 million players worldwide! 🎉

We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you. 🫶

Let’s ignite the battle together! 💖#MarvelRivals pic.twitter.com/5njTulx24e

— Marvel Rivals (@MarvelRivals) December 9, 2024

This is the second successful live service project released by NetEase this year. In July, the Chinese publisher launched free-to-play survival action game Once Human, which surpassed 10 million unique players in its first month.

Another F2P release of 2024, XDefiant, crossed the 10 million mark in two weeks, eventually amassing over 15 million users. However, it failed to retain the audience in the long term, forcing Ubisoft to shut down the game earlier this month.

So it is all about how well Marvel Rivals performs in the coming months. The shooter had an impressive launch, with over 480k concurrent players on Steam alone, but NetEase has a lot of work to do in terms of content updates, patch notes, and other LiveOps stuff.

The Chinese company currently has two games in the top 10 biggest Steam releases of 2024 in terms of peak CCU: Marvel Rivals (#4) and Once Human (#9, 231.6k CCU).