MultiVersus

» see multiversus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

multiversus was the kind of game an american teenager used to brag about playing. that was not my demographic. by 2022 i was on the wrong side of forty and not running a platform fighter on whatever rig was free at home. the most i ever interacted with multiversus was a youtube clip of shaggy doing a galaxy-brain finisher against batman, which is exactly the marketing that pulled twenty million teenagers into the open beta in the first place.

the project started at a small studio called player first games, founded in 2019 by former sledgehammer and treyarch leadership. warner bros funded the development. the open beta opened on 26 july 2022 with sixteen launch characters drawn from dc, looney tunes, hanna-barbera, game of thrones, adventure time and steven universe. by september 2022 it had hit around twenty million players, with a peak steam concurrent number of around 150,000.

that was the high point. by february 2023 steam daily concurrents were down to roughly 1,300. in june 2023 warner bros pulled the open beta to rebuild for a full launch. the eleven months between beta close and full launch were where the audience dispersed.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the appeal at launch was the roster, not the netcode. a smash bros analogue that legally could not exist on nintendo hardware, because it was a crossover the warner brothers ip portfolio allowed and the nintendo ip portfolio did not. lebron james from space jam fighting velma fighting iron giant, with two-button combos and a 2v2 default mode.

the beta hit its twenty million number through tiktok clips and youtube highlights more than through any specific marketing push. the engine was epic's unreal 4, the netcode was a rollback implementation that was acceptable but not state of the art. the monetization was a free-to-play battle pass with founders pack early access tiers. that financial model is what kept the lights on through the eleven-month rebuild.

~ the fall ~

the cracks were structural and obvious from late 2022 onward. retention was poor. the new-character cadence could not match the appetite that the launch roster set. monetization complaints over premium currency and battle pass pacing chased away the casual base. the beta close in june 2023 was framed as a pause to upgrade engines and add new modes. in practice the eleven-month gap killed the player base.

the full launch on 28 may 2024 brought back roughly a fifth of the beta audience. warner bros had bought player first games in july 2024 in an attempt to stabilize the project. five seasons of live service later, the publisher had lost a reported $200 million on the title.

~ the inheritance ~

warner bros closed player first games on 7 february 2025. season 5 ended on 30 may 2025 at 9 am pacific. online services switched off the same morning. multiversus was delisted from playstation store, microsoft store, steam and the epic games store. offline single-player and local co-op still work for anyone who downloaded the final patch and logged in once during season 5.

the inheritance is a cautionary tale: a free crossover brawler can pull twenty million players in two months and still be unable to sustain itself. the genre is hard. the live-service expectations are harder. nick all-star brawl 2 is still standing as the next analogue, with a smaller audience and a more modest cost base. that is the gap multiversus left.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »