People showed up for Marvel and put their money on the table
Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite is going through quite the fascinating resurgence at the moment thanks to the recent release of the big Infinite & Beyond mod, and that enthusiasm has carried over to the competitive scene and viewers too it seems.
Last night’s TNS Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite & Beyond tournament was one for the ages that’ll go down in the history books as presumably the biggest event for the game since the only Battle for the Stones Finals over seven years ago — and it’s all thanks to the FGC.
Tampa Never Sleeps and the strong Marvel players across North America put on one heck of a special show, which the audience was more than receptive to.
It wasn’t even clear at first how the tournament was going to perform since it came up a bit from reaching the 100-entrant goal where the mod’s Producer and top fighting game streamer Maximilian promised to give $1,000 to the pot bonus with the final count being 81 attendees.
There was still Max’s original bonus of $500, but the rest would come from crowdfunding through Matcherino, which sat at only around $55 when the tournament itself started.
That very quickly started to pick up steam and balloon, however, with donations pouring in big and small across the FGC.
By the halfway point of the event, the viewers had already donated over $4,000, and it only kept going up from there with over $5,000 by the time top 8 started.
The grand total ended up being a staggering $7,511 after the finals, and though we’re not sure if this set a record for crowdfunding at a TNS event, we certainly wouldn’t be surprised if it was.
What a night.
Over $7,500 in the prize pool and thousands of people watching Marvel
Thanks to everyone that came through with the contributions for the prize pool, all the people that worked on MvCIB, Maximilian, and the TNS staff for such a great evening.
I hope 2025 is even… https://t.co/gH34k667MF
— Tong @ Frosty Faustings (@TongNeverSleeps) December 29, 2024
Maximilian would go ahead and still throw in $1,100 into the pot himself, and he wasn’t the only one willing to drop some big money to support these players either since there were 21 community members who contributed at least $100 each.
That equates to around $5,700 from said top donors, which is a ton, but also goes to show that almost $2,000 more was made up from the dozens upon dozens of other viewers chipping in.
In the end, the prize pool probably rivaled or eclipsed many fighting game majors with $3,154 going to the winner and over $1,500 to second place.
Even the seventh place finishers got $225.
We’re not sure what the average Matcherino looks like for a fighting game tournament these days, but most of them would probably be very happy to reach $225 total.
So everyone probably walked away from the Marvel Beyond event pretty darn pleased.
I had a lot of fun last night! It was great to play MVCI on the big stage again with a lot of entrants! Feels truly nostalgic. Shoutouts to @TampaNeverSleep and @maximilian_ for the giant raids! I’m glad I could put on an amazing show for y’all. Until next time and GGs! pic.twitter.com/CRt56YilM3
— Stealth @ Frosty Faustings (@StealthTX_) December 29, 2024
It’d certainly be really nice to see numbers more like this consistently for other online or even offline events, but we can’t really expect generous fans to tip $500 or $1,000 every week.
This does go to show there can be a lot of potential power in crowdfunding events for larger prizes to award to the players, and hopefully more fans realize any contribution can make a difference.
It of course wasn’t all about the money either, as more people tuned into this tournament than any other for Marvel Infinite since 2020.
According to Twitch Tracker’s data, Infinite & Beyond drew a peak of over 11,000 viewers though Max claims it reached over 15,000 likely when combining YouTube numbers too.
Yes, you read that right. $7,500 prize pool and 15,000 viewers for @MVCI_Beyond in 2024.
The matches were incredible. Congrats to @StealthTX_ for taking home the biggest MVCI payout since 2017. https://t.co/biwI9R5xx8
— Maximilian Dood (@maximilian_) December 29, 2024
That’s still not enough to beat out a top dog in the FGC like Street Fighter 6, which hit almost 35,000 viewers on Twitch last night, but that was also split between around 300 different channels opposed to only around 30 streaming Marvel.
And those numbers were way more than enough to beat out what the likes of Tekken 8, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and basically any fighter that’s not SF6 this weekend.
In total, Max’s stream shows for the event shows it’s pulled in over 121,000 views on Twitch alone with the TNS video reaching over 25,000 views, which is higher than the most recent TNS Street Fighter tournament and almost 10 times more than this week’s Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 event.
We already saw the player rate jump over 2,000% when the Infinite & Beyond mod released this month, and though it hasn’t reached those heights again on Steam, MvCI is still pulling close to 500 concurrent users today — which is a massive increase over 21 average it was at just a month ago.
What this all means for the scene beyond the immediate future remains to be seen, but this performance and reception shows that people will show up for Marvel and are willing to support passion projects like this.
So we’ll be very interested to see how everything looks a month from now and beyond.
And if you haven’t already, check out the actual action from the Marvel Infinite & Beyond tournament too, which we’ve included below and should start around the beginning of top 8.