Hotcakes: MultiVersus Is Killing Itself

You had a year to get this right, and made it worse.

I normally don’t like riding the Steam stats bandwagon, but it’s pertinent to this article that I talk about it. MultiVersus has been out in its relaunch for less than three weeks and the game has already dropped over 90% of its peak concurrency on Steam. Gone from 153,000 players to under 15k in less time than it takes for USPS to ship a package by ground mail.

MultiVersus is probably only as passable to me as it is because I received a copy of the founders pack during beta and unlocked every single character. If you’re going into this as a free player MultiVersus is going to be a nightmare until you shell out some cash, and even then it’s still going to be a bit of a nightmare.

I said in my preview that MultiVersus would be doomed to alienate its player base if it kept up the bad free to play screwery and not only did they not alleviate it, they made it worse. You can play the game for free, but MultiVersus spends every waking moment reminding you what a cheap asshole the game thinks you are.

By that metric, I don’t think MultiVersus qualifies as free to play. It’s really more of a free demo. You can’t access full parts of the game without owning specific characters. The game locks you out of challenges, rifts, and events unless you own specific characters and specific outfits, so even if you do spend money it’ll let you know how much contempt it has for you not spending more money.

And once you own the game it treats you like crap for not owning everything. I have the founders pack which I think entails me to every character plus the next dozen or so given how many tickets I have, and I’m still locked out of certain Rift events because I don’t have specific clothing for specific characters, and I don’t want to buy those in the shop for $8+ in some cases.

Players First might as well have a message that says “play, bitch” every day. I can take over a week break from Fortnite and still have no problem finishing the battle pass. I was shocked when I logged in and saw that MultiVersus had not only opened up character selection in training, but had extended a daily login campaign.

The Superman login campaign gave two days of leniency before you missed out on all of the rewards. The Joker one was a slog right up until I got to the new event which is even more convoluted in its required costumes/characters. Which isn’t a problem for me because I own all of those characters and also didn’t spend a real dime on it.

I’m annoyed at how much of this game relies on multiplayer to progress through the battle pass and events with any regularity. I’m not terrible in MultiVersus PvP but for how much they touted the game being welcoming to people who just want to PvE, having it be this restrictive is just another middle finger by Player First.

And I haven’t even started on how much the game has been slowed down to a crawl since the beta version. Also the rift events require you to have another player to play through them with you to 100% because someone thought that would be received well. You can’t do couch co-op in Rifts by the way.