The early hype has made Project L out to be a genre superweapon, a blockbuster title sure to greatly expand the typical player base for fighting games to a new generation of casuals. Capcom) with a character roster pulling from the publisher’s long-lived multiplayer online battle arena flagship, League of Legends. Currently, Riot Games is developing “Project L,” a 2D team fighter (à la Marvel vs. This isn’t for lack of trying in recent years. The video game industry has yet to turn a free-to-play title into a truly competitive fighting game. It is, for now, for better or worse, a casual game. MultiVersus made a splashy debut with a $100,000 prize pool for a 2v2 tournament at the Evolution Championship Series esports competition in August, but otherwise the game hasn’t proved as sustainably competitive as its progenitor, Smash. There’s been some recent clamoring for the forthcoming Street Fighter 6 to be free to play proponents imagine this would open the series to a massive, MultiVersus-sized influx of new players. The traditional fighting-game franchises, such as Street Fighter and Tekken-not to mention Smash-have implemented in-game currency, microtransactions, and paid downloadable content for new characters and combat areas in recent releases, but they’ve otherwise resisted total conversion to the free-to-play model. There are many ways a publisher might go about turning a video game into its own storefront, and while not all video games with microtransactions are free to play, free-to-play games rely on microtransactions most decisively. Last month, the studio Blizzard took Overwatch-both the original game and its just-released sequel-free to play, locking some heroes behind paywalls and drawing unfavorable comparisons to the original game’s sometimes controversial but still relatively benign loot-box system. The emergence of the free-to-play model launched a long-running series of arguments over the ethics of such microtransactions, especially since these games tend to target kids. These are microtransactions that’s how they get you. But the free-to-play model means MultiVersus turns its surest profits on players who stick with the game and purchase the other in-game currency, “Gleamium,” which is far more valuable than gold but can be bought in bundles only with real money. Alternatively, players can buy a “founder’s pack” in one of three editions, ranging from $40 to $100, to unlock a variety of perks up front. Like Fortnite, MultiVersus is “free to play.” In other words, you’re free to download the game, you’re free to use MultiVersus’s four sample characters (of 22-for now-total), you’re free to grind matches, and you’re free to spend the in-game gold earned from those matches to unlock new characters, costumes, and flairs. That said, MultiVersus is just one of many buzzy online multiplayer games to launch in the five years since Fortnite. MultiVersus broke through on the easy appeal of its character roster, yes, but also on the strength of its retail price, $0.00, compared to Brawl’s launch at $49.99. Last year, Nickelodeon published a similar title, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, starring SpongeBob SquarePants and Helga Pataki, to tepid reviews and fleeting interest. Published by Warner Bros., MultiVersus contains a star-studded IP crossover roster, including Batman, Game of Thrones’s Arya Stark, and-by virtue of his top billing in Space Jam 2-LeBron James. Still, the early days of MultiVersus have been a peculiar success story, offering an optimistic glimpse of the future of online multiplayer fighting games. Now it’s on par with the typically low post-launch player counts for traditional fighting games such as Street Fighter and Tekken, and it’s lagging behind the current player count for Brawlhalla, another online brawler released all the way back in 2017. The player base has shrunk sizably in the past couple months. ![]() There were more than 150,000 concurrent users playing the Super Smash Bros.–esque platform brawler at its peak in July, and more than 20 million players total, less than a month after the game’s release on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
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