Free-to-play fighting game MultiVersus—most easily described as 'Smash Bros but it's Warner Bros characters'—is having a pretty good launch day, becoming the third most populated Steam game at the moment with a peak of over 110,000 concurrent players. That's actually a little lower than MultiVersus's all-time peak of 153,044 Steam concurrents, which it hit in 2022 during its open beta, but it's a respectable start—or, restart, really.
MultiVersus has a slightly odd history. When the open beta started in 2022, we and a lot of others assumed that MultiVersus would remain available through to its 1.0 release, like a typical early access game. Not so: Developer Player First Games took MultiVersus offline last year to "prepare for the launch."
Although it was unexpected, the downtime might've been the best thing for it: Mollie got an early look at the new MultiVersus, and said last week that it's a "massively improved experience" with weightier combat, improved camerawork, and good new PvE missions. She's also a fan of one of the new roster additions, the somewhat controversial Banana Guard.
Her main complaint was the onslaught of free-to-play monetization systems: "I was bombarded with tons of daily missions, event-specific missions and battle pass missions, which left me disoriented trying to navigate the game's menus," Mollie wrote.
Some players feel the opposite way about the relaunch: Where Mollie appreciates the weighter combat, one Steam reviewer says that MultiVersus is "very clunky and slow now," a sentiment I've seen repeated a few times. It seems a schism may be forming between open beta preferers and launch preferers.
