Marvel Rivals, a third-person hero shooter from NetEase Games, officially launched this week. The game has already proven to be a huge hit with over 400,000 concurrent players on Steam. And that's not including the numbers on PlayStation and Xbox.
The Super Hero team-based PvP shooter lets players assemble teams of Super Heroes and Villains from across the Marvel Universe, combining their unique powers across a variety of maps and game modes. The concept has drawn comparisons to Blizzard's Overwatch, a team-based online first-person shooter that first released in 2016.
While there are some notable differences between the two games, Marvel Rivals definitely feels like it took inspiration from Blizzard's blockbuster game. Following this week's launch, Mike Ybarra, the former President of Blizzard Entertainment, has weighed in with his own thoughts.
In a now-deleted tweet, Ybarra suggested that Marvel Rivals is a clear clone of Overwatch, a statement that doesn't feel entirely wrong given the similarities between the two games. However, he then went on to make the outlandish suggestion that Black Widow in Marvel Rivals is a copy of Widowmaker from Overwatch.
Ybarra was quickly Community Noted and ultimately deleted the tweet.
It's unclear if his tweet was originally meant as a joke because it's such a wild claim to make. To be clear, Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow, existed long before Overwatch's Widowmaker.
Black Widow made her debut as an enemy of Iron Man in Tales of Suspense #52 in 1964 and was reformed as a hero in The Avengers #30 in 1966. That's more than 50 years before Overwatch and Widowmaker were created. Her primary design was introduced in 1970's The Amazin Spider-Man #86 and she's been the main character in multiple comic issues since the 1970s, even receiving her own series in 1999.
So while Marvel Rivals may have a clone of Overwatch in a lot of ways, Black Widow is definitely not one of them.
It's possible that Ybarra was joking or maybe even overexaggerating to get his point across. But even so, comparing two Chinese gaming companies as "all the same" probably doesn't sit well with many.
Marvel Rivals is now available and playable for free on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The game is completely free to play with all 33 of the launch heroes playable immediately. Season 0, "Dooms' Rise" is the opening season and serves as the opening chapter for the chaos caused by each of Doctor Dooms' time experiments that unleashed the Timestream Entanglement.