Square Enix has released the first major content update for Marvel’s Avengers with a new hero and story content, but that has failed to bring back users.
Marvel’s Avengers was one of the most anticipated games of 2020 but due to a disappointing launch, lack of post-launch content updates, and lower than expected critical reception, the game ended up losing a lot of its users. On Steam, it peaked at 28K concurrent users which is pretty tame overall, while on consoles, it didn’t fare any better.
After the most recent Square Enix Presents event revealed the upcoming roadmap for the game that included the addition of Black Panther, new location Wakanda, as well as new story content and other gameplay tweaks and features, it was expected that this would bring back some of the users to the game.
Square Enix has also released a major next-generation update for the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles in addition to bringing Hawkeye, who is the major new hero that has been added to the game since it launched back in September. The addition of Hawkeye also comes with Future Imperfect story DLC that brings in new content. All of this should have left to users returning back to the game, but sadly the reception so far is tepid at best.
Since the release of the new content on March 18, the concurrent user count has barely peaked at 2.5K as per Steam charts, which is 14 times less than the launch peak the game experienced in September. It is a 5 times improvement over the average 500 concurrent users but it is just a terrible number for such a big name game.
For a comparison, No Man’s Sky received its first major update in August 2017 and reached peak concurrent users of 19K as per Steam charts. It was still averaging out between 1-2K concurrent users at that point. Since then, it has received strong post-launch support that helped to propel it to a concurrent user count of more than 90K and an average of 10K. It remains to be seen if Marvel’s Avengers can reverse the trend and bring back users to the game again, especially after the release of the roadmap for 2021 which doesn’t appear to include the PlayStation exclusive Spider-Man.
Obviously, this begs the question, is the game doing any better on consoles? While we have no way of measuring its users on PlayStation or Xbox, checking out the most played games list for Microsoft Xbox consoles puts it nowhere near the top 50 games. It comes around even lower than Cyberpunk 2077, which hasn’t received any substantial updates since January.
master3786 on March 21st, 2021 at 21:41 UTC »
This game has less players than Age of mythology on steam. A game featuring avengers cannot compete with a game that came out in 2002, let that sink in lol.
XeernOfTheLight on March 21st, 2021 at 20:14 UTC »
Who's shocked? I mean they made a cash in and didn't make billions of dollars in minutes. Sorry I just can't feel sad for a corporation's failed project. The bandwagon leaves another corpse behind, As expected.
DisturbedNocturne on March 21st, 2021 at 19:53 UTC »
This isn't terribly surprising. Adding new content is meaningless if it doesn't address the problems people had with the game. A new character may encourage people to check things out, but if they still see the same thing that drove them away in the first place - boring loot, an overabundance of materials, lackluster villain diversity, etc. - they're not going to stick around.
The difference between Avengers and No Man's Sky is NMS's core issue was primarily a lack of (promised) content, something that content updates were able to fix. Avengers, on the other hand, has far more fundamental issues when it comes to gameplay. Unless and until those are addressed, no amount of content is going to bring back players for long.