Only Alpha testers, Founder’s Pack owners, and those who bothered to scrounge a code from Twitch could enter the game during the early access period. However, despite that restriction, MultiVersus reached the respectable concurrent player peak of 62,433 on Steam. As pointed out by EventHubs, it’s more than the main fighting games available on the platform combined, including heavyweights like Mortal Kombat 11, Tekken 7, DNF Duel, Street Fighter 5, Guilty Gear -Strive-, Dragon Ball FighterZ, King of Fighters XV, Granblue Fantasy: Versus, and a few others. Of course, the real potential of MultiVersus will be unleashed now that the game is free to play and open to everyone. That said, Francesco pointed out that the monetization scheme conceived by Player First Games and Warner Bros. Interactive Games currently leaves much to be desired. Almost two months have passed since the end of the game’s closed alpha, and MultiVersus is now ready to be played by users all over the world with the open beta, which also gives us a better idea of how the monetization system will work and how much it can impact the experience. And while the game does feel a little better to play, I am not convinced the free-to-play model will do MultiVersus too much good. MultiVersus has the potential to become one of the most popular platform fighters ever made, thanks to its solid gameplay and great roster, but the game’s monetization scheme could have an impact on its popularity in the future, even though the content that matters most, characters can be unlocked for free with some effort. As the game is still in beta, Warner Bros. and Player First Game still have the chance to tweak and improve the system, and I sincerely hope they will. I want to play a fighting game for hundreds of hours to improve my skills, not to unlock more content that should be readily available. MultiVersus is out now for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S|X with cross-play enabled.
