NetEase has revealed that Marvel Rivals has hit another major player count milestone, just a couple of days after the company closed the Seattle studio responsible for developing the hero shooter.
In its latest financial report (which covers both the fourth quarter of 2024 and the fiscal year as a whole), NetEase confirms that Marvel Rivals has amassed "over 40 million players to date".
The game, which launched in early December, amassed 10 million players within its first 72 hours on release, going on to hit 20 million players in less than two weeks. It's worth stressing, however, that these aren't necessarily active players, just "registered users".
Still, a quick look at Marvel Rivals' Steam numbers (per SteamDB) shows that it's attracted 320,376 players over the last 24 hours, with 130,699 players enjoying the game at time of writing.
NetEase also says that the first season of Marvel Rivals resulted in a new surge of interest in the game, causing the hero shooter to catapult to the top of Steam's top sellers and most-played charts when it arrived.
All of this, as well as what is clearly NetEase's continued faith in Marvel Rivals, makes the decision to lay off everyone at the Seattle-based studio responsible for making the game even more baffling.
In a statement, NetEase said the decision was made "for organizational reasons" and in order to "optimize development efficiency", so in other words, it's all to do with corporate behind-the-scenes goings-on, which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect in this day and age, I suppose.
As for NetEase's financials, they're not much to write home about. The company reported a very small revenue increase for the 2024 fiscal year, going from 2023's total of around $14.2 billion to about $14.4 billion in 2024.
Gross profit also increased slightly, as did net income. NetEase's fiscal year ended on December 31st, so these figures do probably include Marvel Rivals' numbers, but NetEase doesn't provide a full breakdown of exactly how much the shooter made for it last year.
With regards to the future, NetEase says it's got a pretty stacked slate of games to come, including mobile shooter Destiny: Rising, hero FPS FragPunk, and tactical RPG Marvel Mystic Mayhem.
The studio is, however, also pulling funding or pausing projects for several of its other investments, including Just Cause creator Christofer Sundberg's Liquid Swords and Mac Walters' Untold Worlds, among others. We'll have to wait and see what all of this means for NetEase's bottom line in the months to come.
