Free-to-play fighting game MultiVersus—most easily described as ‘Smash Bros but it’s Warner Bros characters’—is having a pretty good launch day, becoming the third most populated Steam game at the moment with a peak of over 110,000 concurrent players. That’s actually a little lower than MultiVersus’s all-time peak of 153,044 Steam concurrents, which it hit in 2022 during its open beta, but it’s a respectable start—or, restart, really.
MultiVersus has a slightly odd history. When the open beta started in 2022, we and a lot of others assumed that MultiVersus would remain available through to its 1.0 release, like a typical early access game. Not so: Developer Player First Games took MultiVersus offline last year to “prepare for the launch.”
Although it was unexpected, the downtime might’ve been the best thing for it: Mollie got an early look at the new MultiVersus, and said last week that it’s a “massively improved experience” with weightier combat, improved camerawork, and good new PvE missions. She’s also a fan of one of the new roster additions, the somewhat controversial Banana Guard.
Her main complaint was the onslaught of free-to-play monetization systems: “I was bombarded with tons of daily missions, event-specific missions and battle pass missions, which left me disoriented trying to navigate the game’s menus,” Mollie wrote.
Some players feel the opposite way about the relaunch: Where Mollie appreciates the weighter combat, one Steam reviewer says that MultiVersus is “very clunky and slow now,” a sentiment I’ve seen repeated a few times. It seems a schism may be forming between open beta preferers and launch preferers.
The recent Steam review average is on the positive side, so the latter opinion seems to be winning out, but then again some of those reviews are just demands for Walter White to be added to the roster, so perhaps we need to give players more time before we can say what the overall reception is like.
