Outriders, the new looter shooter from developer People Can Fly, has a lot of buzz surrounding the game after its well-received demo. Loot-focused games have been an increasingly popular genre over recent years, with big titles like Godfall, Anthem, and Borderlands 3 being just some of the titles that have released. This has caused fans to compare the new game to other recent releases, especially Marvel's Avengers.
There are not too many similarities between the two games other than both being loot-focused multiplayer games. Outriders is a science fiction third-person shooter following an intergalactic colonization effort to save humanity, whereas Marvel's Avengers is a live-service brawler based on the beloved comic book characters. Marvel's Avengers' has had a bit of a rocky launch thus far, with having to delay its expansions to fix bugs at launch, a controversy surrounding the popular character Spider-Man being a PlayStation exclusive, and, more recently, PlayStation fans getting frustrated with the complicated procedure to transfer Marvel's Avengers saves from PS4 to PS5.
This is leading to many gamers comparing the launch of Outriders to Marvel's Avengers in an attempt to gauge the new title's success. In a recent post on Resetera, user Theorry points out that the all-time player peak for Marvel's Avengers, which launched seven months ago, is 31,000. Outriders, on the other hand, had a peak of 55,000 players at the time of the post, just 38 minutes after launch, with a new peak of 103,000 at the time of writing.
It is a strong start for Outriders, especially with its position as the launch of an entirely new IP. Of course, the success of any game cannot be determined on release day, but coming out of the gate with a strong player base is also important, as it will help keep queue times low, attracting new players as positive word of mouth spreads about the title.
This is primarily where Outriders stands to succeed where Marvel's Avengers did not. Marvel's Avengers definitely has its fans, and for good reason, but it has struggled to attract very many new players. Its beta soured public opinion before it even released with its buggy state that prevented players from playing with friends and resulted in frequent crashes, whereas Outriders' demo was popular enough to have early fans put an absurd amount of time into it. Of course, the steam numbers are only part of the tale, with many Marvel's Avengers fans surely playing on PS4 to have access to Spider-Man when the character releases while many Outriders players will likely default to the Xbox Game Pass version of the game as it ir subscription. Only time will tell just how Outriders will perform over time, but it is surely off to a great start at launch.
Outriders is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Source: Resetera
