MultiVersus relaunch attracts over 110K concurrent players on Steam

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Not everyone's keen on the changes, but things are going well for the Warner Bros fighting game so far.

Multiversus key art - Bugs Bunny (detail)
(Image credit: Warner Bros)

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.

Tyler Wilde
Tyler Wilde
Editor-in-Chief, US

Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley during the '80s and '90s, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on early PCs. He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, all the shooters they call "boomer shooters" now, and PS1 classic Bushido Blade (that's right: he had Bleem!). Tyler joined PC Gamer in 2011, and today he's focused on the site's news coverage. His hobbies include amateur boxing and adding to his 1,200-plus hours in Rocket League.