Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite was effectively left behind by the developers and players years ago, but right now, things are looking perhaps more like the Field of Dreams for the game.
With the release of the anticipated Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite & Beyond mod project yesterday, the modern black sheep of the crossover fighting game family is seeing a pretty massive surge in people jumping into MvCI.
Ever since February 2018, Infinite never averaged more than 50 players in the PC version of the game at any time, and you could count the amount of times it reached over 100 simultaneous users on one hand.
But thanks to the Beyond mod project’s launch, MvCI is currently surpassing numbers that haven’t been seen since the month after the game’s release all the way back in October 2017, over seven years ago.
In fact they’re even higher.
According to Steam Charts’ data, Marvel Infinite peaked at 1,202 players in that October on PC.
Last night, however, MvCI reached 1,270 players or maybe even as high as 1,322 if you go by SteamDB’s charts for the game.
Either way, that’s an increase of over 2,167% from the average of the previous month, which we’ve almost never seen for a fighting game before — and especially due to a mod.
And those are just the concurrent numbers, so the total number of players over the past day have likely been in the thousands.
The only times we’ve typically witnessed rather absurd percentage jumps like this came when some previous fighters were updated with rollback netcode in recent years.
Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R reached a new high peak back in 2020 that was technically an 18,103% increase since it went from an average of 12 players to hitting 2,330.
BlazBlue: Central Fiction also shot up just under 2,000% when it got rollback too.
Although Marvel Infinite’s 1,270 players is of course much lower than more modern titles like Street Fighter 6’s crazy 14,000 average over the past month and Tekken 8 hitting over 10,000 the past 24 hours, it is actually fairly close to Mortal Kombat 1’s current average of 1,505 users — so take that as you will.
And while it may not be beating those top dogs, this is crazy to see that a mod release could bring an abandoned title up around the top 5 or top 10 fighting games on Steam right now.
Even the newest release in the franchise, the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection only has a 205 peak for the past day and 100 average over the past month with an all-time high of 2,019.
The Marvel Infinite & Beyond mod received a lot more attention than your typical fan project in large part thanks to the endeavor being headed by top fighting game streamer Maximilian Dood, which led to a lot of publicity outside of the hardcore FGC.
This led to some concerns that the unofficial project could be shut down by Capcom and / or Disney/Marvel from the added eyes on the situation, but luckily they were able to release the first version of the Beyond mod to the wider public.
So now even if the companies do decide to step in at some point, the mod will have already been put out in the wild and in the hands of players where it would never fully disappear.
The team of almost 40 talented programmers, animators, artists, musicians and more are hopefully seeing these numbers and feeling some pride that their hard work is being enjoyed by thousands of people (and increasing Infinite’s overall Steam review rating along the way too).
While these mod launch numbers are certainly cool to see, it’ll be more important to see what the player count will look like after a week and a month or more for how many people stick around beyond the release weekend.
Even if Marvel Infinite drops back down to like an average of 100 users at a time, however, that still means the game would have grown
3–5 times than what it was before the mod and should be considered a win.
And even more if it helps inspire the rise of a new competitive MvC scene too.
It’ll be interesting to see if any future major updates to the Infinite & Beyond mod can produce similar jumps in player counts though we’ll have to wait and see on that.
If you want to get in on the action, Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite is still currently on sale on Steam for 80% off for both the base and Deluxe versions.
Image via Field of Dreams.