Marvel's Avengers has continued its rapid decline, with reports the game has shed 96 percent of players since launch and caused its developer to suffer $63 million in losses. As the team at Crystal Dynamics scrambles to figure out the game's roadmap going forward, it should take a long look at a fellow Marvel game that has managed to successfully thread the needle between players and profits.
Kabam's Marvel Contest of Champions is a free-to-play mobile fighting game with gacha mechanics. Players complete quests and arenas to win various rewards, which can mostly be used to either redeem crystals that grant the player a new random character to use or materials to rank up their existing characters and make them stronger.
The game has over 170 superheroes and villains available as "champions." They can be collected in various rarities, and the champion's maximum potential dependent on their star rating. The combat system relies on strategically employing each character's unique abilities and immunities, all of which are inspired by their actual abilities in comics, films and other media.
While these mechanics may seem relatively simple, Kabam has actually managed to craft a relatively balanced game with a significant skill level required for endgame content. Furthermore, the game has also solved many of the pain points that Marvel's Avengers must now navigate. Both games are a live service, with a significant interest in maximizing microtransactions to justify continued expenses for maintaining and updating the experience. Whereas Avengers has garnered criticism for overcharging for even cosmetic upgrades, Contest has crafted a strategic approach that has minimized the ire of players, though with some exceptions.
Contest offers daily deals that refresh on a schedule, random deals throughout the year, subscription cards that grant rewards over a period of time for logging in and two major sale periods on July 4th and the Cyber Monday weekend. During these special periods, the developer pushes out maximum value for money deals, which players can save for and look forward to for months.
Though buying offers with money results in the best rewards, these days also offer valuable deals for units, an in-game currency that can be earned without spending anything. These business practices have resulted in massive returns, netting the company $3 million on Black Friday in 2019, the most of any app. While annual revenue numbers are hard to find, the game did earn $100 million in its first seven months of existence, though that was over five years ago and the player base has grown substantially since then.
Most impressively, this was achieved without alienating the player base. It's safe to say that Contest has avoided this outcome -- the community's subreddit has over 55,000 members, and YouTube videos from the game's most prominent content creators routinely surpass 30,000 views daily. Some do choose to not spend money at all, but players rarely voice dissatisfaction with the offer system, and many routinely spend to improve their experience.
Of course, to justify spending real money, players must enjoy the game enough to commit to it long-term. This is another issue that Avengers must tackle, as many have called the multiplayer repetitive and bugged to the point that the game becomes unplayable. Though Contest can also get repetitive at times, several mechanics keep it from becoming stale.
First of all, the sheer number of unique champions means players can switch up their chosen characters and will rarely face the same opponents too often. Most encounters also have "nodes" attached, which grant the AI-controlled opponent extra perks and abilities that require strategic adjustments to overcome. The sheer variety and unpredictability of these nodes also means each opponent represents a new challenge.
Players also almost always fight actual named characters from Marvel's pantheon instead of faceless droid armies. Including more of these types of opponents in Avengers -- and powering them up with randomized nodes that make them difficult to fight -- would improve player experience and could encourage players to want to spend more money on a game they enjoy.
Even if players do get used to the Champions roster, two new champions are added almost every month, a schedule that Avengers would do well to try to replicate. While Marvel's Avengers' characters are much more complex in terms of gameplay and story impact, only two new additions have been announced, and only one has a specific launch date announced.
To round out the comparisons, Kabam is also generally responsive to player complaints, adjusting content relatively quickly, reworking outdated and overpowered characters and often issuing generous compensation packages for their mistakes. This is something Crystal Dynamics has been doing to an extent, though how much will change in the long-run is unclear.
Inherent differences do exist between the two games, and Avengers is likely more difficult to program and balance than a mobile side-scroller. To its credit, Crystal Dynamics has seemingly began the long trek towards redemption by finally releasing new content, fixing some bugs and introducing a half-off sale for Black Friday. However, the success of a different game that has access to the same characters and employs a similar live service structure is too obvious to ignore. Crystal Dynamics would do well to communicate with, or at the very least learn from, a company that has seemingly delivered exactly what Marvel fans and action game enthusiasts have wanted for several years.