Marvel Rivals
Marvel Rivals is no doubt making an enormous amount of money as a free-to-play game by selling its extremely well-designed (and often pricey) skins. Now, it’s already doing additional collaborations with other Marvel projects, as it launched with a massive slate of MCU-based outfits.
The new connection will be to PlayStation’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, the Insomniac game that was released in October of 2023. It’s not a completely random bit of timing here, as they’re doing this because Spider-Man 2 is coming to PC, part of Sony’s new philosophy to port its exclusives to PC in increasingly short windows of time. Here’s what NetEase said about the collab:
Marvel Rivals
“Take the first look at Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023) in Marvel Rivals, the Advanced Suit 2.0 blends Otto Octavius’s science with Peter Parker’s genius. Crafted for the toughest battles, it symbolizes Spider-Man’s true grit as a hero.
“Balance is a process. Not a destination.” 🌀 Unlock this legendary costume in-store and swing into action starting January 30th!”
This is in fact “the” Spider-Man suit that Insomniac whipped up with the somewhat controversial white spider on it. It’s a game that has roughly a 100 suits in it, but this is the original. Rivals has drawn some criticism for its own version of Spider-Man which some say isn’t great. I think it was already changed a bit from initial playtests.
Spider-Man 2 also heavily featured Miles Morales for half the game, but he has not made it to Marvel Rivals and is not likely to anytime soon. Not just that he might be too similar to Spider-Man (he does have invisibility and electric moves, however) but he simply is not in the leaked list of characters that cover what appears to be the next two years of content. And they will not release a Miles skin for Spider-Man, that would be an utter mess among the fanbase.
I like the phrasing here of “unlock in-store” which means…you can buy it in the store, but I guess they don’t want to say that. If it’s like other skins, it will probably be between $15 and $20. This will join three other skins that Spider-Man already has in the game, and with roughly a million comic costumes to get through, I would expect he may rack up more than most other characters over time. Though of course that may be affected by how many people actually play him (he’s not currently a top-tier hero in the meta).
Marvel Rivals has it made as it can do an infinite number of various comic and movie skins for these heroes, and unlike say, Marvel’s Avengers, it’s an actually popular game with a very awesome art style, so those skins will sell. More will be out each week, clawing at your wallet.
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