MultiVersus smashed concurrent player records for fighting games upon launch and managed to be the top-earning video game in the United States for July, but the game’s been out just over a month now.
How many people are still actively playing Warner Bros.’ big step into the platform fighting game space now that the initial days and weeks of hype have started to cool off?
While we unfortunately can’t access the player data of console users, Steam Charts thankfully allows us to get an idea of who is sticking around at least on PC / Steam.
We ended up examining MultiVersus’ performance on Steam over its first week after the open beta went live to all compared to this past week, and there’ve been some pretty significant changes.
Even with the release of Morty just days ago, MVS’ daily peaks over the past week averaged around 29,608 users.
That’s still basically double the player count of the second-most popular fighter on Steam, Brawlhalla, but it does not stack up close to when it was breaking records a month ago.
The average MultiVersus peaks over the game’s first week were a whopping 142,920 concurrent players, which means only about 20% of the amount of that crowd are continuing to regularly go online.
Now, big player drops after the first month are expected in any video game that initially peaks at launch. We see it all the time.
It’s just the level of how much MVS did go down that we’re not as much used to seeing.
These comparisons won’t be fully congruent since Steam Charts doesn’t get that granular with data in titles that have been out for months / years, but it’s the best we can do.
Other fighting games like Street Fighter 5 and Guilty Gear Strive both saw a drop of about 50% from their peaks through their second month.
Those titles were full-priced $60 games, however, and MultiVersus is free-to-play and widely available for just about anyone to try — so it makes sense that more people would try MVS out when it was blowing up before dropping off after a few days / weeks.
Brawlhalla, despite being free-to-play as well, isn’t good for comparisons either because that game actually grew larger and larger over time.
We did, however, attempt to draw some similarities between MVS and another f2p cross-platform game with a big initial push, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel.
From Master Duel’s peak at 262,333 players on Steam through its second month, the game’s average playerbase fell by around 67%.
That’s much closer to what we’re seeing with MVS’ numbers compared to our usual fighting affairs, but there’s still a noticeable gap there (though again that’s comparing weeks to whole months, so it’s not perfect either).
As something of a new beast in the space of fighters, it’s difficult to fully gauge what the current numbers mean about the game’s trajectory.
The fact that MultiVersus is still technically in an open beta state where features of the game aren’t finished throws a wrench in there too.
It’s also important to remember that these figures only account for the Steam users and not those on PlayStation, Xbox or the Epic Games Store.
Even if the playerbases were even with PC on console, that’s still like over 90,000 players going online at the same time each day, which is pretty wild next to what we’re used to for fighting games.
But the numbers are probably even higher than the consoles too.
MultiVersus is certainly in no danger of burning out any time soon, especially considering the game has already crossed 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 for the foreseeable future.
They’ve gotten off to a historic start so far, but the true test begins now.