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‘Marvel’s Avengers’ Sees 10x Playercount Increase, Is F2P The Way?

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Marvel’s Avengers is pulling out all the stops ahead of its Black Panther expansion in two weeks in order to get its playercount up. And that includes a free-to-play weekend going on right now on PlayStation, Steam and Stadia.

The results are…very clear. After months of languishing below 1,000 peak players on Steam, the game has now shot up from about 700 players per day at peak hours to 7,800 yesterday, the highest figure since launch, and no new additions, not Kate Bishop or Hawkeye, have gotten it anywhere close to that high.

A not-free game going free and increasing the playercount as a result is not exactly revolutionary, but the fact that Avengers is seeing a spike like this does beg the question that maybe if there is any saving the game’s long term ambitions, that going free-to-play may be the way to do it.

There are risks involved, of course. Marvel’s Avengers has perilously few paths to actually make the kind of money a game like this is supposed to generate. It has game sales, first and foremost, and it has a microtransaction store. But all new actual content, even a sizable expansion like War for Wakanda, has been promised to be free, and remains free, unlike competitors like Destiny and Borderlands that routinely sell DLC or season passes.

Going free-to-play would leave Avengers with only a single source of revenue, microtransactions which are mainly entirely optional character skins, and that may not be enough to sustain the series.

But the current path is not likely to sustain the series either. They really, really need to increase the playercount in order for there to be anyone to buy those microtransactions in the first place. I would argue that the most dedicated players have stuck around, and that the heavily discounted version of the game you can find for $20-30 most places now is not exactly flying off shelves, not to mention the entire secondhand sales market which earns them exactly nothing. Even if going F2P can be seen a desperation move by struggling games, that’s…kind of where we’re at right now. The game badly needs to increase its playercount or it’s hard to envision future support past this expansion and Sony’s contractually mandated Spider-Man appearance.

If this does indeed happen, it will almost certainly not be before the Wakanda expansion launches in two weeks. The idea of the current F2P weekend is that you’ll get players playing, and then convert them to people who actually want to buy the game to finish out the content they couldn’t get to, and then go on to play War for Wakanda, and so on.

But if that doesn’t work, and not enough sales are converted, then yeah, it might be time to seriously consider permanent F2P, despite the loss in game sales revenue. I do not think that is a guaranteed path to long term success, and yet it does seem increasingly better than the alternative, sub 1,000 players on PC with probably not a ton more on console.

Anyway, as ever, I suggest you try out the game for free if you’re not like, testing Halo or something more important. See what you think, and come back for Wakanda in two weeks if you really dig it.

Update: The playercount has now hit a new peak of 10,000 as of today.

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