Early December featured a host of last minute additions that were not timed to make it into The Game Awards’ 2024 slate, but they are proving to be some of the year’s biggest successes all the same.
Chief among those are Marvel Rivals, the superhero shooter, and Path of Exile 2, where an Early Access build offers a significant preview of the full game to come.
Both of these games are performing amazingly well, and doing so with almost identical playercount numbers on Steam. At the time of this writing:
Path of Exile is #4 on Steam
- 300,000 concurrent players
- 24 hour high of 414,000 concurrent players
- All-time high of 578,000 players
Marvel Rivals is #5 on Steam
- 262,000 concurrent players
- 24 hour high of 402,000 players
- All-time high of 480,000 players
It’s a really unique situation as you simply do not seem two games launch almost simultaneously, both instantly becoming huge hits, both being able to do so seemingly without affecting the other. Here, of course, the genres are wildly different, a hardcore ARPG against a multiplayer hero shooter, which helps there be room for both. But we rarely, if ever, see this happen, as most of Steam’s top 10 list is old entries with the occasional surge from a newcomer. Two at once, doing this well, is unusual.
Path of Exile 2 may be less of a surprise given that this is a game players have been waiting a decade for. But it’s significant because this is Early Access, and kind of very early access with huge chunks of the campaign missing and entire skills and weapon classes not there yet. I keep finding items with unwritten “coming soon” descriptions. But there is more than enough here to dig into, easily dozens or even hundreds of hours based on what is there, and these numbers reflect that.
While Marvel Rivals did look like it was shaping up to be good, it is hard to have a true breakout success in the multiplayer shooter genre these days. Yes, it has the Marvel badge, but we have seen plenty of Marvel games flop or underperform, from Marvel’s Avengers to Midnight Suns. It’s not some magic bullet for success.
Marvel Rivals’ playercount has barely dipped at all since launch, it’s almost a flat line, indicating that loads of players have stuck around. Path of Exile is dropping a little bit, but it also has a campaign you can finish, and if you don’t want to stick around for a lot of endgame grinding, I’m not surprised some people would move on.
Two different games, two massive end of year hits. Go try em.
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