TecRah

Wen Xue Dexing

Editor Liu Shiwu

One month after its launch, NetEase’s Marvel’s Battle of the Bands has become an instant hit. Its older brother, Watchmen 2, or OW2 for short, has also recently launched a national beta test, calling for the return of old players. Whether it’s the point in time or the high degree of overlap in the player base, the two seem to be on opposite sides of the spectrum.

On December 8, Marvel’s Battle of the Bands attracted more than 10 million players within 72 hours of its release, and according to SteamDB, the total number of concurrently online players that day was more than 480,000, and that’s not even counting other platforms such as xbox. Meanwhile, Watch Dogs 2’s numbers are plummeting, and the gap between the two games’ popularity is widening.

What’s interesting is that at the beginning of the game’s launch, a large number of players in China gave bad reviews to Comic-Con and didn’t seem to like the game, but now because of the explosion of the overseas market, many people are starting to re-examine it.

With a NetEase production and a NetEase agency, will the two games go toe-to-toe next, or will it be a win-win situation?

The battle for one month of service, the foreign service is on fire, the national service is really fragrant.

In the first few days of its launch, Marvel’s Battle of the Bands had a mediocre response in China, and did not receive much attention on video platforms such as B-station and Jittery Voice.

User evaluation, and even only in steam Chinese area to get 20 30 positive feedback, such as optimization is not good match mechanism pull down hit feeling rotten and other criticisms are endless. And after a month, the evaluation slowly rebounded to a mixed 56.

The initial reviews on steam were not favorable.

Contrary to the domestic atmosphere, the reaction of foreign players seems to be a little too enthusiastic.

The number of players worldwide reached 10 million within 72 hours of the game’s opening, and exceeded 20 million a week later. In the live platform twitch heat is not low, the prime time ranked third in the game list, force VALORANT GTA5, showing strong momentum. In terms of evaluation, the game’s favorable rate in the English area has been maintained at about 80.

The popularity and evaluation of Manga Battle on the internet are very good.

The competition between Marvel Battlefront and Watch Dogs 2 was inevitably discussed by players. After the release of the first season of Neverwinter Nights on January 10, the number of concurrently online players on the Steam platform peaked at 644,000, which is a new record, far exceeding the best performance of Watch Dogs 2 on the platform.

In contrast, Watch Dogs 2 has had a rough time of it. According to steamchart, over the past seven days, Comic Book Showdown has seen a steady 84 million views, while Watch Dogs 2 has averaged around 15 million views, a two-fold drop compared to the previous two months, and is still on the decline.

Looking back, Marvel Contest of Champions has also seen a significant uptick in popularity and reviews in the country. Many Marvel Contenders related videos are much hotter compared to before.

Although we can’t be sure whether Marvel Contest of Champions chose the right path or gambled correctly, it is worthwhile for the industry to think deeply about the fact that it preferred to invest its promotion resources in the European and American markets, where the influence of Marvel’s IP is huge, and in the end it was able to feed back to the domestic market by utilizing the heat of the foreign market, which made it a beautiful turnaround in a short period of time.

Small black box and B station on the Comic Book Battle of the national service of the heat of the big rise

Is the familiar feeling back? Compared to OW, what are the advantages of Battle of the Bulge?

What are the advantages of Strikeforce over OW? There must be a reason for Strikeforce to be able to make a big splash in the international market.

From gameplay to character skills to map scenes, Marvel’s Battlefront borrows a lot from its big brother, Watch Dogs. At the time of the first exposure of Marvel Contenders, many veteran players, including overseas players, thought that it would likely be a Marvel Skin-enhanced OW ping-pong.

But why are overseas players choosing Marvel vs. Watch Dogs 2 over the more prestigious Watch Dogs 2 now? After all, for them, Watchmen 2 is always available.

The answer to this question may be found on both sides.

Outside of the online circulation of flirting with ow’s video

The first point from a comic book contender’s point of view is not to underestimate the impact of IP.

Marvel IP in Europe and the United States market popularity, no less than the domestic players in the heart of the Three Kingdoms or Journey to the West, and has a considerable potential for battle adaptation. From the development of the 1930s, Marvel Comics created Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man and many other superhero images, the audience group is quite broad, the emergence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe MCU is the influence to the world.

Starting with Iron Man in 2008, the MCU series of movies has achieved great box office success worldwide and become a cultural phenomenon, with elements such as lines and character images in the movies being widely quoted and imitated in daily life.

Many new players are not players of OW like games, they are just attracted by the Marvel IP and the pure American comic book style of the game, and hope to be a superhero in the game.

As The Gamer points out, players flocked to the beta of Rivals Marvel Battlefront International just to have Spider-Man fight Magneto or have the Hulk team up with Storm, and the popularity of the IP helped open up the doors for Rivals.

Games that have traditionally offered this type of role-playing experience are mired in DEI, meaning Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Due to the growing trend of political correctness, too many stateside manufacturers are catering to the diversity trend by making superheroes that are supposed to be beautiful or handsome unattractive, and even perceived by gamers as intentionally degrading to their characters.

One black blogger, J The Concept, compared the character art of Marvel’s Brawl to that of another Marvel IP game, Marvel’s The Avengers, and mentioned that the Eastern market has quietly risen to prominence ever since the uglification of the characters started happening. Since they’re pointing out that European and American manufacturers can’t give gamers what they want, we’ll do it for them.

A 10 million view tweet on X compares the art differences between Marvel Contenders and Marvel Avengers

In this case, NetEase’s Marvel vs. the Avengers instead offers European and American gamers a more comfortable look at the Super Heroes characters, and appears to stand out from the crowd of DEI-influenced Marvel characters.

Also, Marvel vs. the Wizards does, in the words of the former Blizzard president, clone some parts of the OW, but it also has a lot of new stuff of its own.

For example, it changed from a first-person shooter to a third-person shooter, allowing players to see their Marvel heroes in action, changed the detailed gameplay of carting, and drove the car without the need for the player to stay around, introduced a scene destruction mechanic and hero crossover gameplay, with more varied and standardized hero skills, and a more enjoyable combat tempo and experience, and became more relaxed about the strengths of the heroes and matchmaking mechanics, without constantly emphasizing the importance of teamwork, and didn’t lock the player’s character type, lowering the level of matchmaking. The hero strength and matching mechanism is also more open, not always emphasizing the importance of teamwork, without locking the player’s character type and reducing the matching time.

We can feel that these new changes are moving in the direction of fun, trying to reduce the feeling of being on the edge of the seat and satisfy the experience of recreational players, and these practices may have learned from the lessons of OW’s predecessors.

Going back to the OW side of things, there are a lot of lessons left behind.

Watch Dogs 2 has been paced from the moment it debuted in late 2022. First of all, the sin of laziness, the carnival promised PVE mode, delayed again and again, and finally simply announced the cancellation, so that many old players expectations fell through!

The second is the sin of greed, the business model is too ugly to eat, giving the feeling of eagerness to cash in, which is very unfriendly to players.

After the game version changes, new heroes and advanced battle passes are bound, zero kryptonite players need to liver for a long time before a new hero can be played, the previous part of the game that has not been charged has now become commercialized content, as big as $20 skins, as small as $7 pendants, and even behind the back of the hard to squeeze out of the PVE content is still a $15 DLC paid content.

In addition to this there are all sorts of outrageous operation operation and from time to time appear management tyranny theory, so that in August 2023 when blizzard will OW2 online steam platform, less than two days to reach the bad reviews like a tide of war.

The national service players of the watchman pioneer is the most deeply injured batch, because at the beginning of 23 blizzard announced and netease contract termination, the national service account data resources are all frozen, still want to hold on to the national service players even if you can hang VPN to play the international service, but also still need to be in Hong Kong or Taiwan’s cell phone number.

So much so that after the emergence of Comic Book Battle, many players play it simply because they hope that their support for Comic Book Battle can spur and even attack Blizzard. After all, as long as the operation of Marvel Battle seems a little bit normal, it has already won over OW2 too much.

The Last Bastion: What are the prospects for OW2’s national service?

Given the loss of players and the recent strong competition from Marvel vs. the World, the return of OW2 to China may be a lifesaver for Blizzard Entertainment, which has been suffering from both internal and external problems in recent years.

On closer inspection, we can see that Marvel’s Battle of the Bands is still far less popular in China than it is in the global market. The global sales data of January 11th on the BlackBox shows that even though Marvel’s Battle of the Bands has already ranked first in the world, including the United Kingdom and the United States, its best result in China is only fourth. Similarly, there are some domestic players who think that Battlefront has a sense of handheld gameplay, and they think that OW2 is still powerful in terms of gameplay texture and design, so it’s not as if OW2 doesn’t have a fighting chance in China.

So, will it win?

Or look at the booking situation in the distance As of press time, OW2 national service network booking player number exceeded two million, although the real gold of this two million is not yet known, but the watchman pioneer as a lot of old players sentiment card, its influence or not to be underestimated.

From NetEase’s point of view, after all, the Marvel Struggle is one of the direct competitors of OW2, and as the agent of OW2 national service, the relationship is really somewhat delicate.

In fact, NetEase in the agency of Blizzard games in the proportion of revenue is very low, in the performance level of the impact is small. Previously, NetEase itself also mentioned in the earnings report, the agency game in 2021 and 2022 the first nine months of net income and net profit contribution percentage are low single digits, will not have a significant impact on the company’s financial performance.

For NetEase, the agency blizzard game may be more about IP influence and brand value of these potential factors For Activision Blizzard, Microsoft’s acquisition has ended, and blizzard department in the group’s momentum is much weaker than Activision department, the next OW2 in the end what new work is still unknown.

Now facing its own game of the same type, NetEase for the domestic operation of the Watchmen Pioneer will be distracted? After all, the comic book battle in the domestic heat is still climbing, also has the intention of facing the domestic market, such as the recently launched college students authentication free deluxe pass activities.

One unfounded clue is that after NetEase resumed its partnership with Blizzard, the launch of OW2 was exactly two months behind Marvel’s Battle of the Bands.

Before that, the popular World of Warcraft and Hearthstone Legends were both launched in August/September 2024, essentially returning within the promised summer season, while OW2 was delayed until February 19th of the following year. Does Netflix have their own plans on this side? I.e., at least delaying until Comic-Con Brawl has been running for a while before letting the two games go head-to-head.

Lastly, if Marvel vs. Wolves does beat OW, or if it does rival OW, will it inherit OW’s gameplay inertia and decline as if it were cursed?

I can’t say anything about the answer to that, but I can end with a joke I saw the other day

Recently, Apex has been losing a lot of players, and an Apex anchor and his buddy were discussing whether to join Comic Con, but his buddy advised him not to join the national service first because the matchmaking environment is worse, there are a lot of stressful monsters, it’s not friendly to newcomers, and so on.

Apex is the first game in the world to be released. It’s a new game, isn’t it?

Because there are a lot of OW players who have switched over. The buddy summarizes.

Just kidding, no offense to any players, we all want our favorite games to get better and better.

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