If someone told you of an upcoming platform fighter featuring a roster of the most currently relevant popular culture characters under Warner Bros’ banner; created by people who played, appreciated, and were directly inspired by Super Smash Bros.; and that was accessible to the point of being free to play?
On paper, MultiVersus is a perfect storm of positives that should cater directly to a massive gaming audience. In reality, it failed to capitalize on this perfect storm not once, but twice. RV Rocks has been playing MultiVersus since its 2022 beginnings, and has launched a new video taking a closer look at why people didn’t find the experience fun enough to keep returning.
With options from Game of Thrones to Rick and Morty, The Iron Giant to the Matrix, Batman to LeBron James and well beyond, it’s true that MultiVersus offers players control of figures from all over the popular culture universe. Having these kinds of characters in a Super Smash Bros. setting did indeed bring players out as MultiVersus has two obvious bumps in its Steam Charts records: its first and second launches.
People came out in droves for the game’s initial launch back in 2022 as a peak of over 153,000 concurrent players was quickly established, but that number dropped precipitously over the next two months, steadily waning into quadruple, triple, and eventually just double digits.
A spike back up to 114,000 came in April of 2024 when the game saw its grand re-release, as audiences clearly hoped developers had figured out how to make the experience more consistently entertaining in two years of work, but as we look at the numbers here in late December, that clearly has not been the case.
MultiVersus’ status as a free to play game is simultaneously one of its biggest intrigues as well as a (somewhat) secret thorn in its side. The highs fellow free to play experiences like Fortnite and Overwatch have reached make the model incredibly alluring for developers and perhaps players alike, but countless examples from over the last half decade have proven F2P is not an automatic win by any means.
RV Rocks digs into five different topics that he feels are among the most pertinent reasons as to why the game fell off, but an underlying thread of frustration and lack of enticing in-game processes seems to run through them all. Give his video a watch and let us know in the comments why you feel MultiVersus just didn’t work despite having so much potential in its corner.