The Many Mistakes of Multiversus
A Contrast with Rivals of Aether 2
Fighting games are an oddity in the modern age of “forever games”. While other esports like MOBAs and shooters are able to support multiple billion-dollar games, fighting games have been notably absent among live services. What’s missing? Gameplay fantasy is obviously not the problem – raw physical combat has always had mass appeal. The leading theories are:
Social play. Juggernauts like LoL, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, and even Rocket League all involve cooperative teamplay, which promotes social virality. 1v1 fighting games are antagonistic by nature, even when playing with friends.
Accessibility. Fighting games are awash in deep strategy and complex mechanics, which presents a steep learning curve to new players.
Incumbency. The major fighting game developers, from Capcom to Bandai-Namco to Nintendo, are all legacy companies who predate the live service era. Perhaps they’re simply too complacent, suffering from the innovator’s dilemma.
Platform fighters like Smash Bros. have often been touted as the more accessible cousin to traditional fighting games. The sales numbers tell the story; in their latest installments, Smash Bros sold 34 million copies, and Street Fighter sold 4 million. On top of that, their 4-player engine naturally supports team 2v2 and casual free-for-alls.
Enter Multiversus. Live-service platform fighter with an emphasis on teamplay, developed by a scrappy start-up. Three out of three bullets hit! It’s a compelling pitch, and likely drew tens of millions of dollars of investment (though I can’t find any hard numbers). What could go wrong?
As it turns out, everything. With 20-20 hindsight, it seems like Multiversus was wrong on all three assumptions. Let’s break it down.
2v2 Fighters are Not Popular
If you ask any Smash Bros player whether they prefer 1v1 or 2v2, you’ll get a pretty consistent response: 1v1 is king.
There’s a couple of reasons for this. First of all, 2v2 is simply chaotic. With four characters on screen at any given time, there’s a lot to keep track of. Which opponent should you target? Do you need to help your teammate? What threats do I need to be aware of? Can I do a team combo? The number of interactions to track rises quadratically with the number of players; by this benchmark, 2v2s have 4C2 = 6 times as much complexity as 1v1s.
We see this dynamic mirrored in other team games. Even in 5v5 chaos of LoL, Counter-Strike, and Overwatch, most of the game is actually designed to split players up and create smaller 1v1 interactions. Teamfights are chaotic and confusing, but that chaos is acceptable because they are the rare intermission to the one-on-one. In a 2v2 fighter, there’s no respite from the intensity.
The inferiority of 2v2 is empirically evident. From a feature perspective, Smash Bros Ultimate made online play to support 1v1, but opted not to support 2v2. From a data perspective, 2v2 tournament entrants are always fewer than 1v1; at premier Smash Bros tournaments, 2v2 entrants are about -60% fewer than 1v1 entrants.
Multiversus either neglected to collect this market research, or opted to ignore it.
Platform Fighters are Not Accessible
Fighting game commentator and streamer Sajam recently tried out a new platform fighter, Rivals of Aether 2. He is brand new to platform fighters and has never played Smash Bros, but he is a veteran fighting game player and experienced with plenty of other esports. Moreover, he has a learning-focused mindset, often teaching new players or learning new games on his stream. Surely he can pick up platform fighters, the “accessible cousin” to traditional fighters.
The 90-minute stream was painful to watch. Sajam fumbled over the controls, was confused by the core game mechanics, and repeatedly killed himself by accident. While he maintained his polite professional demeanor, the frustration was palpable. His experience was so bad that the lead developer of Rivals, Dan Fornace, apologized on Twitter.
Why was Rivals so hard for Sajam to learn? Sajam points to the lack of new player resources, which was certainly a factor. But as Dan says, a tutorial is just a piece of onboarding, and they can only go so far. At the root, platform fighters are just hard to learn.
Even the simplest actions like moving and attacking are complex, with a dozen different movement states that affect the attacks you have access to. Players often accidentally fall off the stage to their deaths. In contrast, I can’t think of another popular game where killing yourself by accident is a regular occurrence for experienced players.
Platform fighters are also extremely fast and physically demanding. Smash players regularly hit actions-per-minute of 600+, which exceeds the notoriously fast Starcraft (though the comparison is admittedly apples-to-oranges). This video about Smash Bros Melee illustrates the point.
Broad Appeal =/= Accessibility
Platform fighters have a mistaken reputation for accessibility, likely stemming from Smash Bros’ broad popularity. With Nintendo’s kid-friendly design and popular mascots like Mario and Pikachu, Smash Bros is particularly popular among unskilled yet enthusiastic children. Everyone and their little sister has played Smash Bros. The casual demographics of Smash Bros’ audience masks the complex gameplay underneath. This confusion between broad appeal and accessibility has misled many pundits to claim that platform fighters are simpler and more accessible than traditional fighters.
The truth of the matter is that competitive games are fun if your opponent is evenly matched, regardless of how complex the game itself is. Smash is beginner-friendly because there are a lot of other beginners. The deep game knowledge and demanding execution do not deter newbies if they are also fighting other newbies. They’ll learn together as they play together. In contrast, Rivals of Aether was difficult for Sajam to learn because the game appeals to genre experts. Most of his opponents are already competitive smash players and most of the new player resources are directed at experienced players. No wonder the game was hard to learn.
Genre Expertise Matters
Multiversus was not made by genre experts, and it shows. While the game boasts a wide range of Warner Bros characters, the gameplay itself feels lackluster. Movement feels floaty and disjointed, attacks lack audio/visual juice to feel satisfying, combos are awkward, and the roster emphasizes quantity over quality. While Multiversus ran an aggressive marketing campaign pulling in major smash streamers, they pretty much all abandoned the game after their contracts ran out.
Rivals of Aether 2 offers a stark contrast to Multiversus. Rivals courts hardcore smash players with dynamic and nuanced gameplay. Characters have very tight and polished kits, boasting innovative designs and strong identities with clear strengths and weaknesses. Rivals feels like the spiritual successor to Project:M, a popular Smash Bros mod forced underground by Nintendo’s legal department. Rivals is close enough to Melee and Ultimate to attract players from established games.
This isn’t a one-off success. Lead developer Dan Fornace has been working on Smash-like games for about 15 years. Rivals 2 is obviously the sequel to the first Rivals of Aether, released in 2015. Before that, Fornace made a fan game “Super Smash Land”, which recreated smash bros in the style of the original Game Boy. It takes a decade of experience and multiple iterations to reach the level of polish found in Rivals 2 or Smash Ultimate. It is downright arrogant for Multiversus to believe that they could compete with these experienced incumbents on their first game.
Multiversus was likely funded in hopes that it would become the LoL or Fortnite of fighting games. I can see why their pitch seemed to make sense. But ideas are cheap, and executing is difficult. Epic Games was a decades-long expert on shooters, from Unreal Tournament to Gears of War, and Fortnite Battle Royale was a pivot from the original Fortnite Save the World, which gave the team plenty of time to design and polish the shooting and building mechanics. League of Legends was largely a novice team, but their genre competition was mostly against the Warcraft 3 mod map Dota, which was built by hobbyists and had no revenue to fuel development. Fighting games are a mature and saturated genre at this point, with plenty of passionate developers with decades of genre expertise. Looking at the resume of Multiversus’ leadership team, they brag about God of War, League of Legends, and Call of Duty. Not exactly the team you want to throw at a platform fighter.