MultiVersus broke concurrent player records for fighting games managed to be after the launch Top grossing video game in the US for Julybut the game is already more than a month old.
How many people are still actively playing Warner Bros. A big step into the platform fighting game space as the early days and weeks begin to cool with the hype?
Unfortunately, while we cannot access player data for console users, Steam charts thankfully it lets us at least get an idea of who’s left on PC / Steam.
Compared to last week, we examined MultiVersus’ performance on Steam during the first week after the open beta was released to everyone, and there were some pretty significant changes.
Even with the release of Morty a few days ago, MVS averaged 29,608 users per day over the past week.
That’s still more than double the number of players Brawlhalla, the second most popular brawler on Steam, but nowhere near when it broke records a month ago.
Average MultiVersus peaks in the game’s first week was 142,920 concurrent players, which means only 20% of that crowd continues to be online regularly.
Now, any video game that peaks at launch is expected to have a major player drop after the first month. We see it all the time.
It’s just how low MVS has fallen that we’re not used to seeing that much.
These comparisons won’t be exact, as the Steam Charts don’t get as detailed with data from titles that have been around for months/years, but it’s the best we can do.
Other fighting games such as Street Fighter 5 and Guilty Gear Strive both saw declines of around 50% from their peaks for the second month.
However, those titles were $60 games, and MultiVersus is free and widely available for just about anyone to try – so it makes sense that more people would try MVS while blowing up MVS. a few days / weeks.
Brawlhalla, despite being free-to-play, doesn’t compare too well, as this game has only gotten bigger over time.
However, we have a huge initial push between MVS and another f2p cross-platform game, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master duel.
From Master Duel’s peak of 262,333 players on Steam to its second month, the game’s average player base dropped by about 67%.
It’s closer to what we see with the MVS numbers than with our regular combat work, but there’s still a noticeable gap (though it’s still comparing weeks to whole months, so it’s not perfect).
As a new beast in the Warriors space, it’s hard to fully gauge what the current numbers mean about the game’s trajectory.
The fact that MultiVersus is technically still in open beta, where the game’s features aren’t finished, throws a wrench in there as well.
It’s also important to remember that these numbers only refer to Steam users, not those on the PlayStation, Xbox or Epic Games Store.
Even if the player bases are PC on console, that’s still like over 90,000 players online at the same time every day, which is pretty wild compared to what we’re used to for fighting games.
But the numbers are probably even higher than consoles.
MultiVersus certainly isn’t in danger of dying out anytime soon, especially considering the game has surpassed 20 million downloads in total.
How the developers continue to handle the first season and eventually move away from open beta will likely have the biggest impact on the game’s performance in the near future.
They have made a historic start so far, but the real test begins now.
