Marvel Rivals came out in December 2024, and at first, things looked really good. Players jumped into it fast, excited about getting to use heroes like Spider-Man Man Iron Man, and even Captain America. By January 2025, the game had hit around 279K concurrent players on Steam. NetEase tried to keep the pace going with more content like the Fantastic Four and Ultron. They even did a big tournament called Marvel Rivals Ignite with a prize money of three million dollars. Still, even after all these additions and events, the player numbers started going down not long after.
Between February and April, the game lost around 70K-80K monthly average players. Then, in May, another 30K went away. And just this last month alone, about 5K-6K more players stopped logging in. It has been a slow but steady drop, and now many in the community are beginning to feel concerned. Most think the issue is not really about content being missing, but more about how the matchmaking system is working.
Why Marvel Rivals Player Count Dropping
EOMM type behavior
Some players think Marvel Rivals uses a kind of system called Engagement Optimized Matchmaking (also referred to as skill-based matchmaking). This system tries to make sure your win rate stays near 50-55%. So if you win a few games in a row, then your next match usually becomes way harder. It feels like the system matches you with weaker teammates or makes the enemy stronger just to balance results. For lots of people, this starts to feel less like real competition and more like the game has pre-decided who should win.
A big problem is how the game puts players of all kinds of skill in the same match. Sometimes a bronze player ends up facing someone from master rank or even has to team-up with one. That creates matches where one side wins too easily and the other does not get a chance to do anything. New players feel like they are not learning, and older ones feel stuck because the teams are always all over the place.
Players who go on winning streaks notice that matches change suddenly. Teammates stop working together, enemies suddenly become very precise, and even the map starts to feel like it is harder to play on. So then it feels like winning is not rewarded, it just makes the next game worse. This removes that feeling of progress and instead makes it tiring to keep trying.
Bots in Competitive Play
In some games, mostly in Quickplay, players noticed teammates acting very odd. Some of them just walk straight line, getting suck in obstacles or walls, ignoring the fight, or staying at the spawn point and do nothing. A lot of people think these might be bots or filler accounts added to help matchmaking move faster or to make teams more even. But when you lose because your team had bots, it does not feel fun at all. It just makes people want to log off. Even doesn’t feel rewarding when you know the opponent team didn’t have a chance.
Other Issues
All the major issues being debated by the community today originated in Season 2 and 2.5. Dive-heavy compositions with heroes such as Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Venom became too much to handle, particularly in poorly coordinated solo queue games, resulting in regular one-sided battles. Also, Marvel Rivals still requires top-of-the-range PCs. Fewer active players mean that toxic behavior is more apparent now. Players who don’t want to switch roles or whine about teammates are trickier to avoid with repeated matchmaking.
In The End
Despite these general concerns, numerous players feel that the Engagement Optimized Matchmaking (EOMM) is central to the declining fun in the game. The notion that results feel staged, where victory results in disproportionately difficult opponents or less capable teammates, makes the experience less skill-based and more governed. It erodes the feeling of advancement and fair play. So, whereas many of the bugs and balance issues from Seasons 2 and 2.5 have been resolved, frustration with matchmaking still exists, and unless it gets a serious fix in Season 3, the game stands to lose even more of its dedicated base.
