One of the biggest streamers of the past ten years, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has weighed in about the latest multiplayer shooter tearing up the charts after his years being on top of the Fortnite Battle Royale scene.
On a recent stream (via Dextero), Ninja said he believes Overwatch is “dead and gone” thanks to Marvel Rivals, due to both Overwatch dropping the ball and what Rivals has to offer over the long term future. The quote:
“It’s so unfortunate. Here’s the thing — first off, they already have a new map coming, which is incredible. Second, they have so much lore and so many heroes and villains and anti-heroes that they have enough for updates for the next ten years.”
He goes on to talk about how Overwatch fumbled its “Overwatch 2” launch which was generally viewed as more of a major update than anything resembling an actual sequel. Plus, all the promised PvE content that took years of development but was ultimately scrapped (Marvel Rivals hasn’t said anything about PvE yet, but it certainly does not seem out of the question).
As for the “next ten years” of Marvel Rivals content, I mean, I don’t think he’s wrong that it could happen. In covering leaks for the game, if the game releases two heroes a season like it says it will (already a wild pace compared to Overwatch), there are allegedly almost three years of heroes that are hidden in the files for future release (a recent rumor is that some of these could be fake plants by NetEase, but still). Marvel certainly has a hundred major and minor characters easily you could put into a game like this. Overwatch has to invent all of its heroes froms scratch, and it takes a very, very long time to do so, as evidenced.
I know people are saying that Marvel Rivals is still in its honeymoon phase, only releasing two months ago. While that’s true, it’s also the launch of a successful live service hero shooter. If you’ve been following the scene, you know how impossibly rare that is in today’s competitive online space, attempting to drag people away from the other ongoing live games they’ve been playing for years, from Fortnite to Apex Legends to Call of Duty to…Overwatch. We have seen so, so many games try and fail to do this, while Marvel Rivals has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. You can see the long term vision pretty easily if they keep this up.
I think it’s too early to declare Marvel Rivals one of the biggest games of the next decade, but I do not think it’s wrong for Ninja to say that it poses a significant threat for Overwatch, where it will be hard for that game to attract any sort of new attention or even hold on to parts of its playerbase who head to Rivals. And that’s the last thing Blizzard needs right now.
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