Text/Repair

01

Flowers bloom inside the wall, fragrant outside the wall

Grape Jun has said several times before that the embarrassing situation of "Marvel IP" in the domestic market - it seems to be top-level, but in fact it is second- and third-tier, and almost no game can be called a success.

But what's interesting is that NetEase seems to have finally found the correct use of this world's top IP after experiencing Marvel MOBA, Marvel CCG and other products: storming overseas, with a national server.

Yes, I'm talking about NetEase's self-developed game "Marvel Brawl" launched today.

Within 3 hours of its launch, the game reached No. 1 on Steam's global best-selling charts (excluding Path of Exile 2 in lockdown regions), ranking No. 2 with a peak of 440,000 concurrent users, and its only rival was CS:GO.

The hottest game on the overseas live streaming platform Twitch is also "Marvel Brawl", surpassing "GTA5" and "CS:GO", second only to the comprehensive column "Chatting about the World".

All kinds of overseas KOLs are broadcasting, and the most common words in the live broadcast room are: Cool, Crazy, Amazing......

Compared with the hot atmosphere overseas, the domestic market is much more stable. In the Steam China best-selling list, the game only ranked 17th, and the vast majority of Steam reviews came from overseas players; The official content of the game has received much less attention on domestic platforms such as Bilibili, Douyin, and Weibo, which is much lower than that of overseas platforms such as Youtube and X.

It is not difficult to see that "Marvel Brawl" has put most of its resources on globalization, whether it is R&D ideas or marketing directions. Before launch, the game's Steam wishlist rushed to fourth place, and the data from both overseas tests exceeded the team's expectations.

In terms of the choice of development platform, the game has also confirmed that it will only be launched on consoles and PCs, regardless of the mobile game version. Although there are reasons for the difficulty of mobile development and design, it should also take into account the slim opportunities of this type of mobile game in the overseas market and the fact that the domestic market is not enough to support it, so the team dared to say it to death.

To some extent, we can say that "Marvel Battle" is a truly global product, and the domestic market is only one of the regions where it will be launched simultaneously in the world. Today's results of the product also prove the feasibility of this idea.

Of course, the premise of being able to do all this is that everyone really thinks that the game itself is good enough to be a meal replacement for Overwatch 2, which is already a bit half-dead.

02

Proper usage of Marvel IP

"Marvel Brawl" now has 5,318 Steam reviews, which is a majority of 75% positive reviews. The negative reviews are mainly focused on technical aspects such as poor optimization, resolution performance issues, frame rate issues, and graphics card content issues.

The most liked positive comments are basically focused on the comparison with "Overwatch":

· The game is all heroes free, and apparently they remember the mistakes made by Overwatch.

· I would say that this is the killer feature of Overwatch, but Overwatch has committed suicide.

· I love it, but hope it doesn't repeat the mistakes of Overwatch.

And in terms of data, "Marvel Brawl" is indeed temporarily ahead of "Overwatch 2".

In fact, when "Marvel Brawl" was first exposed, many people, including overseas players, thought that this was "China OW", a skin-changing game of "Overwatch".

In terms of system framework and project logic, this game is indeed similar to "Overwatch", and from the perspective of marketing strategy, the team's target users are obviously the group of players who have lost or are disappointed in "Overwatch 2".

But with the gradual exposure of the actual content of the game, everyone soon discovered the core selling point of the game - the full restoration of the Marvel hero battle scenes.

In order to achieve this selling point, the game does not use FPS (first-person shooting), but chooses TPS (third-person shooting), which can show more male modeling, action, special effects, etc.; In terms of specific skill design, "Marvel Brawl" is obviously bolder than "Overwatch", and many people will say that all the supermodels in this game are (too strong), and everyone is in the sky.

Of course, this can cause some problems with the game, such as balance issues, perspective issues, and the fact that the whole combat scene can be very chaotic due to the cool special effects of the characters and the strong action performance. Not to mention, this game also supports scene destruction, once the two sides fight, you can imagine how difficult it is for ordinary players to identify battle information.

Doesn't the team know this? Of course, the development team also said that it is continuing to optimize the problem of screen flowers and battlefield chaos, doing special effects grading, special effects LOD, 1P, 2P, 3P special effects rules, etc.

But the game obviously won't weaken the heroes' combat performance because of this, because letting Spider-Man swing spider silk, Doctor Strange open the portal, Hulk transform, and Iron Man fly into the sky to make a big wave is the most important design statement.

As the team told Grape: "The biggest difference between Marvel Brawl and other hero shooters is that we made the sense of "super" to play a superhero, and the diversity of experiences for different superheroes. The most attractive point for players is mainly to resonate with the dream of a superhero in everyone's heart. ”

At the same time, highlighting individual abilities and enhancing entertainment also solves the problem that once plagued Overwatch to a certain extent - too much pursuit of fair play, making the hero design more and more lacking in personality and characteristics, and demanding the abilities of each member of the team.

The approach of "Marvel Brawl" is to highlight the highlight ability of each superhero in the design of the underlying numerical framework and the skill mechanism of different heroes, so that each hero has the ability to break the game through his own operation.

Looking at the project idea of the entire game of "Marvel Brawl" from a distance, it may be that IP comes first.

Previously, when Grape Jun had a conversation with the project team, the chief curator Guangguang mentioned that when the team first started to do Pre-Demo (Demo of Demo) to verify the basic gameplay, they were already thinking about superhero battles and scene destruction. When it comes to the DEMO stage, it is a point-taking gameplay set in New York City, composed of four heroes: Hulk, the Winter Soldier, the Witch and Iron Man.

The difficulties of all subsequent developments, including almost all of them are related to IP: movies or comics for artistic texture? FPS or TPS for viewing angle? Should the scene be destroyed or not? Should the battlefield screen be simplified a little?

In these dilemmas, the team almost all chose IP in the end. "The Marvel Universe itself is colorful, and each hero has their own theme color: Loki is green, Witch is red, Hulk's gamma energy is green, and Iron Man's laser is blue with a sense of technology. We can't erase all of these things for the sake of gameplay, and that's not Marvel. ”

Later, the team and Marvel reached a consensus on hero design: when making heroes, be crazy first, and then think about how to achieve balance in the game.

In addition to restoring the hero's abilities, the game also creates a more "Marvel-like" scene destruction gameplay for each map: from Asgard's Reshaping Shatter, Tokyo 2099's Spider Silk Shattering, to the hidden terrain changes brought about by Hydra's anti-invasion protocol......

At the same time, as a shooting game, the game also has a lot of content, starting with 33 heroes, each with more than 400 voices, including Chinese, Japanese and English Chinese, and has a large background introduction and hero story. Not to mention, how good each character's art assets are.

Finally, it is worth noting that this time "Marvel Brawl" has obtained the entire 85 years of Marvel's full IP authorization, including the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). It can be said that in addition to not using the face models of movie actors, the game can already run unhindered in the "Marvel IP Universe".

You look at the skins sold in the mall, they all correspond to the works one by one: Spider-Man in "No Way Home", Iron Man in "Avengers 4", "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3", "Doctor Strange 2", "Deadpool and Wolverine", ......

"Marvel Brawl" may be the most luxurious game in the current Marvel IP lineup.

03

Something is proven

But having said all that, no matter how good the results on the first day are, it is only the results on the first day. For a long-term product that has gone big, the real test of "Marvel Brawl" has just begun.

Marvel IP does attract volume overseas, but it's hard to say how long these IP fans can stay in the game. No matter how entertaining hero shooting is, it still has its operating threshold, and the strong feedback of victory and defeat is still the ultimate sieve funnel of the game.

On the other hand, in the competition with "Overwatch 2", although the game currently occupies the high ground and has won the hearts of many OW users, it cannot be ignored that many people actually come with the mentality of "angry and indisputable", and want to make "Marvel Brawl" to make "Overwatch 2" better. Once Overwatch 2 really gets its way, it's likely that these users will be lost.

After all, no matter how good the game is at restoring the "Marvel IP", problems such as battlefield chaos, too much information, and the performance load caused by scene destruction are always a hurdle that needs to be solved for a competitive shooter. This has been pointed out by many players, but now it is masked by the novelty of the new product.

Still, this result proves something. For example, NetEase has finally found the correct use of "Marvel IP" after repeated defeats, and "Marvel Brawl" has every potential to become one of the most successful Marvel IP games.

For another example, the hero shooting track used to be popular when "Overwatch" first came out, and everyone wanted to copy it, but with the decline of "Overwatch", almost no one mentions this gameplay anymore, basically taking out the hero skills and putting them into other popular shooting categories, such as Tarkov, Chicken, and CS.

However, the results of the first day of "Marvel Brawl" show that this category still has a considerable audience, and even this kind of appeal or desire is so big that the team "works hard", and the first exposure, testing, and online landing of the project have been completed in just 8 months.

The team told Grape Jun that the test volume of the original test plan for May this year was around 10,000, and the team just wanted to take this opportunity to see the player feedback. However, many well-known foreign streamers, such as XQC and Shroud, as well as many waist streamers, are broadcasting, which makes the final number of players participating in the test close to 100,000.

Later, the game's wishlist growth in August alone was close to 400,000 players, the number of closed members of Discord's previous channel exceeded 350,000, and the maximum concurrent online test on Steam exceeded 50,000, all of which prompted the team to officially set the release date for December 6.

"Marvel Brawl", together with the performance of previous products such as "Naraka: Bladepoint" and "Seven Days World" on the Steam platform, you will find that NetEase is becoming more and more familiar with the temper of users in overseas markets. At the same time, these products also once again show that NetEase's judgment on the PC market is correct - NetEase is the first of several large domestic manufacturers to pay attention to the PC side.

Of course, if you ask "Marvel Brawl" whether it can reproduce the grand occasion of "Overwatch" back then, I think it is most likely not. After all, its gameplay is not as innovative as Overwatch, and it is difficult for us to reach a certain consensus in a certain field as easily as before—and games are no exception.

So the "that summer" that everyone always mentions will never go back.

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