Executive Summary

• MARVEL Contest of Champions (MCOC) is a mobile F2P fighting game developed and published by Kabam’s Vancouver studio. MCOC became the fastest growing Kabam game, surpassing $100M in revenue in just 7 months, and it accounts for 202M (45%) of lifetime downloads for Kabam and $1.33B (70%) of lifetime revenue.
• In April 2015, Kabam received an investment of $120M by Alibaba to enter the Chinese gaming market, prompting Kabam to sell and move on from its legacy portfolio of web-based strategy games. Later, in March 2017, the studio was acquired by Netmarble, with a game built on the same engine and the Transformers IP set to launch soon after.
• MCOC’s success came from being at the intersection of action gameplay (i.e., WB’s Injustice fighting game) and F2P progression and monetization (i.e., DeNA’s MARVEL: War of Heroes collectable card game). As a result, MCOC is set to remain the #1 top-grossing action game in the US for 8 years in a row since its launch, generating +$100M/year in the region.
• MCOC continues to add two new characters per month, and its live services are a gold standard for the F2P games environment, usually mirroring content from the MCU films.
• MCOC’s biggest challenge lies in balancing skill (which is rewarding for fighting game aficionados) and balancing the power progression that drives the game’s ‘collect and upgrade’ gacha progression.

Avengers (and More) Assemble

In June 1982, Marvel Comics published its first limited series, Contest of Champions. The Grandmaster and a hooded figure called the “Unknown” used teams of superheroes from Earth as pawns to battle for the ultimate prize. Captain America, Wolverine, Iron Man, and Black Panther, amongst many others, came together for this epic crossover long before the concept of crossovers was established. This was Marvel’s first big Marvel-Universe-shaking event.

Fast forward to 2014, and we have the release of MARVEL Contest of Champions (MCOC), a F2P fighting game developed and published by Kabam. Based on its namesake comic, the game has teams of Marvel heroes and villains in 1v1 combat with Collectable Card Game (CCG) progression elements, PvP/PvE, and a robust story mode. The game was soft launched in Canada, Sweden, and Denmark on October 31st, 2014; it garnered 162K downloads and earned $138K in revenue before its global release 40 days later on December 10th, 2014.

The game surpassed $100M in revenue (and 40M downloads) in just 7 months, becoming the fastest growing Kabam game ever, surpassing its 4X game, The Hobbit, which took 13 months to hit $100M (link). MCOC was positioned perfectly at the intersection of Warner Brothers’ (WB) successful Injustice: Gods Among Us fighting game (gameplay video), which had DC characters duking it out with mobile-friendly fighting controls, and DeNA’s Marvel: War of Heroes, which features CCG progression. This was a mix of Marvel’s IP and a F2P game done right, with console HD graphics, attention to detail in characters and storytelling, tap-and-swipe-based, simplified fighting controls with gacha collection, and metagame progression elements of CCG games.

As of October 2022, MCOC has generated $1.33B in total revenue, representing 70% of Kabam’s lifetime revenue with 202M downloads (45% of Kabam’s lifetime downloads). Kabam started as a social F2P web game company in 2009 with titles like Kingdoms of Camelot, one of the first successful strategy games on Facebook. By April 2015, Kabam repositioned itself solely on developing mobile games, shutting down support or transferring its legacy portfolio of web games to other companies (link). This move was triggered by an investment of $120M by Alibaba, which fueled its entry into the Chinese gaming market.

Partnering with Longtu Games, Kabam launched MCOC in China under a different title — Marvel Fighting: Clash of Champions — redesigning the game to cater to VIPs and autoplay mechanics. The game was live for just 7 months (May 2016 to January 2017), generating only $1.67M and 2.24M downloads, after which Kabam decided to self-publish the title, shut down the China-only version, and transfer players to the global version (link). Both versions are iOS-only in China, and MCOC has not yet seen an Android launch in the region.

Out of MCOC’s 202M global downloads (unified across iOS and Android platforms), the US takes the majority share with 39.3M downloads (25%), Brazil comes second with 18.5M (12%), and India comes third with 14.4M (9.23%) — in-line with where Marvel’s IP is strongly recognized (link). China comes in fifth with 11.2M downloads (7%) through its iOS-only release, bringing in less than 2% of global revenue ($20.9M). The US leads the revenue charts with $789M (65%), UK comes in second with $68.6M (6%), and Germany third with $53.3M (4%).

Since its launch in December 2014, MCOC has maintained a strong position on the worldwide revenue top 10 charts for action games, ranking at #1 in 2015 ($116M) and a steady #3-4 position for years 2017-2021 with +$180M/year in revenue. The action games top charts have been dominated by Tencent’s Honor of Kings since its release (China-only), a MOBA that holds the position of highest grossing F2P game in the world (link). Supercell’s Brawl Stars and Moonton’s Mobile Legends: Bang Bang have since snagged the top positions from MCOC, making $384M and $202M respectively.

However, when looking at the US top charts for action games, MCOC has been the reigning champion for the past 7 years, bringing in over $100M in revenue each year for the past 6 years. WB’s Mortal Kombat X has been the second best performing action game, but its revenue pales in comparison to MCOC, hitting a high of $20M in 2021. WB’s Injustice and Injustice 2, which feature DC heroes and villains, made only $5M and $15M, respectively, in 2021. All three of WB’s action games combined generated less than 50% of MCOC’s revenue in 2021!

In March 2017, Kabam’s Vancouver studio, which operates MCOC with 180 employees, was acquired by Netmarble (link). Weeks after the acquisition, the team released Patch 12.0 which nerfed the most powerful characters and made defensive, skill-based play of using blocks and parries nearly ineffective. This led to a massive backlash from the top alliances in the game, dropping the game to its lowest position in the top grossing ranks (link). Also, MCOC’s game engine had the potential to support the development of MCOC-like hits, kicking off with Transformers: Forged to Fight, but this first attempt turned out to be a bust for Netmarble and will be shutting down in January 2023 (link).

In this essay, we’ll deconstruct all that makes MCOC the most successful action game in mobile F2P, examining:

• The action gameplay and the game’s evolution throughout its updates
• How it brings gacha mechanics to the West
• The character collection drivers
• Industry-leading live operations that mirror the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)
• Improvement suggestions and a look at planned future updates

Is MCOC’s performance as unstoppable as the Marvel IP behemoth that's fueling it? Let's dive in and find out.

A New Challenger Enters the Ring

The launch of WB’s Injustice mobile F2P game that accompanied the flagship premium game was the first of its kind — a console-quality release on mobile. The characters looked fantastic, gameplay had intuitive gesture controls, and there was a simple ‘battle and progress’ economy that allowed players to directly purchase the strongest heroes of their choice from the get-go. This formula was built upon and polished with the release of Kabam’s MCOC, a more robust fighting game with (most importantly) a more robust F2P game economy inspired from CCGs. WB continued in its lane of launching supporting products, like Mortal Kombat accompanying a similar launch of its premium flagship game.

A comparison of their performances shows MCOC to be in a league of its own. Aligned by launch, the year one performance of these titles shows MCOC and Mortal Kombat getting similar download numbers (43M and 39M respectively), but MCOC greatly outperforms in revenue — $81M to Mortal Kombat’s $24M and Injustice’s $30M. Looking at a five-year timeframe since launch, the other fighting games struggled to hit $100M in revenue, whereas MCOC generated $820M in the same period. All of WB’s fighting games combined failed to reach the success of Kabam’s MCOC.

Compared to MCOC, most F2P fighting games have vastly different live operations models and economies. By its meta design, MCOC is a character collection game, being closer to the economy and progression systems of games like Scopely’s Marvel Strike Force (MSF), launched March 2018 in the RPG category, and Supercell’s Brawl Stars (BS), launched June 2017 in the Action category. The success of MCOC over its competitors comes entirely from its CCG-like meta design.

The year one performance of these 3 games in the US shows how close MCOC and Brawl Stars are, driving similar downloads (~12M), revenue (~$58M), and RPD (~$5). The outlier here clearly is Scopely’s MSF, which made $45M from less than half the downloads (5M) and had the superior RPD of $8.79. Comparing their performances four years down the line, MCOC still leads in revenue and downloads — 29M and $393M respectively — but its $13.54 RPD pales to the $31.83 RPD of MSF. This shows that MCOC is a much broader product than MSF, but it lacks spend depth in the meta when compared to squad RPGs.

Let’s dive into what makes MCOC a unique mix of fighting game with a robust and broad F2P business model.

Welcome to the Contest

In MCOC, players assume the role of a Summoner tasked by the Collector to collect, level up, and manage teams of heroes and villains to participate in quests and 1v1, arcade-style fights. Quests are made up of a grid-like map of nodes and paths that requires energy to move through. Players can only proceed in one direction towards the end of the quest (with no backtracking), but they can take different routes wherever they come across an intersection of paths. Opponents that must be battled and defeated block the player's path forward. Battles take place in iconic locations from the Marvel comics and the MCU, like the Stark Tower in New York or the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier.

Each quest has two major types of rewards — a completion reward that is granted the first time players complete a quest and an exploration reward that tasks players to explore each node and path across multiple playthroughs. While exploring the map, players also pick up additional rewards along their journeys, which are kept in the quest storage and are granted once the quest is completed. Quests generally reward resources like Gold and ISO-8, which are used to upgrade characters to make them stronger, as well as catalysts to rank them up.

The gameplay follows what Injustice on mobile launched with — characters and environments rendered in full 3D, fights taking place on a 2D plane, and gesture-based controls designed for touchscreens in lieu of on-screen buttons and virtual joysticks. The player character always fights from the left, with the opponent on the right side of the screen. The screen is divided into the player half and the opponent half, with the offensive actions triggered on the opponent side and defensive actions triggered on the player side.

Tapping the opponent side activates light attacks that combo into a series of hits. Light attacks can be blocked for reduced damage. Tapping and holding on the opponent side triggers a heavy attack when released. This attack can break through blocks, but the character is very vulnerable during the tap and hold phase. Swiping towards the opponent makes the character sprint forward and activates heavy attacks that combo into a series of hits that are slower than light attacks but do more damage. They can be countered by the faster light attacks. Swiping away from the opponent triggers the character to quickly shuffle away and dodge any incoming, short-range attacks.

Аs characters take and dish out damage during the fight, a special attack bar at the bottom of the screen starts filling. The special attack button glows green when the first charge is full, yellow for the second charge, and red for the third and final charge. The higher the charge of the special attack, the stronger the damage and effect of the move. Each character has unique special attacks based on their tier (star rating), and triggering a special attack is instantaneous and cannot be interrupted, though the first two levels (green and yellow) can be blocked. The character will always perform the highest level of special attack, meaning that when all three bars are full for maximum charge, the special attack button can only trigger the most powerful third special attack and cannot be used to trigger three one-charge special attacks.

Combat also requires precise timing to execute parries or perfect dodges, with early or late reactions being punished. A well-timed block at the exact moment of being attacked triggers a parry that further reduces damage and can inflict a stun debuff on the opponent, opening them up for attack. Similarly, successfully dodging backward from an attack at the precise moment it's about to land grants a boost to critical rating that lingers for a few seconds. Most endgame, maxed out content requires heavy investment from players to practice and ‘git gud’ at this timing component of combat in order to compete.

Characters in MCOC belong to one of six classes, each having an advantage over one (Class Bonus) and a disadvantage over another. Classes loosely relate to the lore of the characters, i.e., Iron Man belongs to the Tech Class, and Wolverine to the Mutant Class. From the Class Relationships circle (in the above image), the Cosmic Class at the top has an advantage over the Tech Class to its right and a disadvantage to the Mystic Class to its left. This means that in battle, a Cosmic character will do bonus damage to Tech characters as well as take reduced damage from them. Similarly, a Cosmic character will do reduced damage to Mystic characters and take bonus damage from them.

These Class Relationships add another layer of strategy when building a team of heroes for a specific quest. Before starting a quest, the player is given information on the different enemies that will be encountered and their Class types, giving players an opportunity to maximize on Class bonuses. Since there are six Classes and only five slots per team, players can’t have characters that cover all Class bonuses. This simple Class bonus system is easy to understand and effective in getting players to strive to upgrade characters belonging to different Classes from the get-go.

Characters are most commonly associated with how many Stars they have, referred to as the Tier of the character (1 Star = Tier 1). Tier 1 characters are the least powerful, Tier 2 are the most common, and Tier 5-6 are the strongest and the rarest of characters. A character can belong to multiple tiers, like the example in the image above. The character rating, a combination of all the character’s base stats, increases from Tier to Tier, with 6-Star characters having a significant advantage in stats. There is no way to advance a character from one Tier to the next, so they remain at the Tier level they begin with.

MCOC launched with characters ranging from Tiers 1-4, with Tier 5 being added in October 2015 (a year after launch), Tier 6 in early 2018 (3 years after launch), and upcoming Tier 7 planned to be released in 2023 (8 years after launch). With the addition of higher-tier characters, MCOC has continued to add new gameplay mechanics to the battle system. Tier 5 characters have a mini-game on their third special attack which increases damage when performed successfully. With Tier 6 characters, the game added a special skill called ‘Adrenaline’ that activates when these characters are hit, allowing them a brief window to hit their opponent back to regain some of their lost health.

Leveling up characters using Gold and ISO-8 items (an XP-granting resource) directly increases their stats and rating. Once they hit the level cap, characters need to be ranked up via a resource called Catalysts. Catalysis come in three types: Basic Catalysts (gray in color and range from Tiers 1 to 5), Class Catalysts (they come in the six Class colors and range from Tiers 1 to 5), and Alpha Catalysts (the strongest and rarest and come in Tiers 1 to 2).

A combination of different Catalyst types, Tiers, and amounts is required to rank up level-capped characters. The chart in the image above shows the increasing difficulty of ranking up higher-tier characters. Basic Catalysts are common rewards among most quest types, including Daily Quests; Class Catalysts are uncommon, usually found in Event and Alliance Quests; Alpha Catalysts are hardest to find, usually as rewards in Alliance War Seasons. Ranking up 1-3 Star characters also unlocks their Special Attacks, with 4-7 Star characters starting with all their Special Attacks already unlocked.

The Art of Fighting

Traditional, premium, arcade fighting games that popularized the genre, like Street Fighter, Tekken, and Mortal Kombat, are essentially skill-based games that require a lot of knowledge upfront to play (usually referred to as having a high skill floor and ceiling). Each character has its own moveset, abilities, weaknesses, and counters, and the outcome of the match is usually decided by the proficiency of the player. Knowing your human opponent well goes a long way in anticipating their moves and countering them. Practicing moves and timing is key to getting better at the game.

Yet, when it comes to F2P fighting games, the main goal of the fighting system is to act as the collection driver, ensuring all players experience that getting better in fights is more about collecting and upgrading their roster of heroes. Getting good with timing and special moves at the opportune moment helps, but the more effective advantage comes from stat progression. This is in stark contrast to the genre of skill-based fighting games and led to the dilemma Kabam found itself in while trying to continue updating its game with new, more powerful content.

At the heart of the controversial 12.0 update was the move to make the game more stat-based than skill-based with its change to the block proficiency stat and moving stats from percentages to flat values. This affected the damage that characters took from parrying (perfect blocking in time of an attack landing), which was near zero before the update but after it caused characters to take massive amounts of damage, swinging to the stat differences in characters for outcomes of a match. Though this made perfect sense for the business model and stat progression driving the game, it also meant the teams of characters that players had been building (and spending to build) for years were suddenly heavily debuffed and ineffective.

Kabam can be blamed for not effectively ensuring that the player community was informed and prepared for the upcoming changes, which also made some of the endgame content unwinnable. The company released an apology for not working with its community towards the changes it intended (link). It has mostly stuck to the changes to the power progression introduced with patch 12.0 but has continued to balance characters and content to ease players into them.

The skill-based vs stat-based debate is also relevant in the implementation of the auto-battle AI that allows players to skip actively participating in fights and focus more on the meta outside them. In most hero collector RPGs with auto battle systems, the outcome of battles doesn’t change much between player-controlled vs AI-controlled as it’s mostly a game of stats, not skill. But the battle system of MCOC was not built from the ground-up for auto battling, and given the fighting game genre constraints, there is quite a swing between outcomes of player-controlled vs AI-controlled (given equal stats). This ineffectiveness of the auto battle system combined with the inability to directly purchase pulls for the strongest characters (a must for VIPs, which we’ll explore next) are the two leading reasons the game failed to succeed in the eastern markets.

Champions Are Forever

At the heart of MCOC’s character collection system is its unique gacha machine, the Premium Hero Crystal, which can be bought for 100 Units costing about $4. This crystal guarantees a 2- to 4-Star hero with the following drop rates:

• 2-Star Hero: 77%
• 3-Star Hero: 20%
• 4-Star Hero: 3%

For simplicity, the 4-Star hero drop rate and 4-Star Nexus Hero Crystal drop rate have been combined. A 4-Star Nexus Hero Crystal pulls 3 4-Star heroes of which players can select one.

Players can collect either new heroes or duplicates of heroes they already have. Duplicates unlock and upgrade signature abilities of that hero and get converted into Gold, ISO-8 (upgrade materials), and Crystal Shards. 2-Star hero duplicates convert into 3-Star Crystal Shards, 3-Star hero duplicates convert into 4-Star Crystal Shards, and so on. By gathering enough Crystal Shards, players can form a Hero Crystal that guarantees a 3-, 4-, 5-, or even 6-Star hero. For example, a 5-Star Hero Crystal requires 10,000 5-Star Hero Crystal Shards which are converted from duplicate 4-Star Heroes. 275 shards are converted with each duplicate, hence 36 pulls of 4-Star duplicates are needed to gain one 5-Star Hero Crystal.

This gacha machine differs from those seen most commonly in hero collector RPGs (like Lilith’s Dislyte which we deconstructed here) in the following ways:

• Aside from a dozen or so exceptions, all +230 characters in MCOC are available in 2-Star to 6-Star variants, making massive pools to pull from. This is vastly different from the norm in which heroes are distinct across rarities, making for smaller pools.
• It’s not possible to directly buy a chance of dropping a 5- or 6-Star hero. Usually, the highest tier characters are still part of the premium gacha with the lowest drop rates.
• There is no pity system in MCOC, meaning each roll is independent and not affected by previous rolls. This is in stark contrast to the more general trend of guaranteeing a high-tier item every 100 rolls.
• It’s more expensive with 10 pulls costing $40. The general trend in mobile F2P is to charge $25 for 10 pulls.

With years of updates, MCOC has been adding special offers and promotions across its different game modes and activities, targeting account-specific needs such as level of progress, opening certain Crystals, or completing particular quests. This detail of player segmentation and personalization of the game’s offer systems can be experienced in every session: Claimed your daily free Crystal? How about boosting its rewards with a limited-time offer? Pulled a lucky 4-Star character? How about a limited-time offer for character-specific rank-up resources to get a head start?

The grind for earning the upgrade resources that enable characters to rank up can be intense, and MCOC lets players pay to skip the grind right on the upgrade screen. These quality-of-life improvements that deliver avenues to spend right when and where players most want them have been of particular focus in MCOC’s live operations. This is possible due to the addition of higher tier characters, which ensures there are always characters to chase and grow, even when paying to skip some of the grind. As stated above, 36 pulls of 4-Star duplicates are required to collect a 5-Star character. When 6-Star characters got added, they added a new chase of 36 pulls of 5-Star duplicates for a powerful 6-Star character, adding newer avenues to skip the previous grind with offers and sales. With 7-Star characters incoming next year, MCOC will be able to add even more promotions to get players up to speed chasing the strongest content yet again.

The Gold Standard of F2P Live Operations

From its inception, MCOC was an ambitious project when it came to live operations. The game planned for and released heroes, campaign content, and updates in line with the MCU series of films. The above chart shows a yellow line for every MCU film released since the game’s launch (list of films can be found here). As you can see, the spikes in downloads closely correspond to the film release schedule, with events and new characters being usually released 2-4 weeks prior, taking advantage of all the pre-release promotions. Notably, 2020 was the first year in a decade that Marvel did not release an MCU film due to complications arising from the pandemic (link). Downloads for MCOC were down 32% on iOS and 12% on Google in 2020 when compared to 2019.

Hand in hand with the downloads, the game’s revenue also spikes significantly alongside MCU film releases, owing to the new content and characters that get released. All aspects of the game are centered around nudging players toward the new content:

• Event Quests that usually feature characters and story arcs from the upcoming MCU films run during these spikes and offer unique rewards like a 4-Star variant of a new hero for completing them at higher difficulty within the time limit.
• New time-limited Crystals featuring the new characters are run during this period for a 50% premium over the regular Hero Crystal.
• Top players in the Versus arenas after the duration of the event receive a 4-Star variant of the new hero, requiring heavy investment in resources like energy for battles and items that give streak bonuses for wins.

This new content phase usually lasts four weeks, and once it's complete, the new heroes are added to regular Premium Crystals, and the events are closed to be re-run in the future. Even without MCU film releases in 2020, MCOC managed to keep its cadence of releasing two new heroes per month via event quests and supporting content.

Revenue spikes also occur hand-in-hand with the game celebrating its anniversary each December in the following ways:

• A special calendar that rewards players for logging in every day
• Special Arenas that award 4-Star and 5-Star Crystal Shards to the top players
• A limited-time Solo Event to earn some 6-Star Crystal Shards

As with the new content releases, the limited-time anniversary activities and rewards require heavy investment of resources to complete. Solo and Alliance Events are designed to reward performance in specific parts of the game, like ‘Win with Mutant Champions’ or ‘Complete Daily Quests.’ Players receive milestone rewards by earning points towards these events, with the best prizes reserved as ranked rewards for the top 1-10% of players.

MCOC features Alliances for 30 players to band together and participate in some of the most rewarding content like:

• Alliance Quests: cooperative, multiplayer, time-limited quests tasking players to coordinate and work together to take down powerful foes. This quest requires Alliance Quest Energy, and characters used in the later maps are locked and unavailable to use outside of this mode until the quest is completed or the time runs out.
• Alliance Wars: a battle between two alliances where both sides pick defensive teams and attack teams to dominate for points that are tallied at the end of a 4-week season for rewards. The characters chosen are locked into this mode.

These cooperative events with their aspirational rewards increase the collection pressure on players, as they need to max out several teams of characters to be locked into these modes while still participating in dailies and event quests outside of them.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

The MCOC team is looking to add three new vectors of power progression:

• 7-Star characters: pushing the stat cap even higher, launching sometime in 2023.
• Ascension: a feature designed to further progress all existing characters beyond their current caps, essentially bringing lower-tier characters into the starting stats of higher-tier ones (through slow, grindable progression). This does not have a release date planned yet.
• Relics: a new customization feature that will allow players to edit abilities and attributes of their characters, launching in November 2022.

As a content-driven game, MCOC has always been at the mercy of its power creep — a need to constantly add stronger and stronger characters for players to chase and replace their current maxed out rosters. Five years after the 12.0 patch, the MCOC team is gearing up to communicate upcoming changes and take its community on a journey to attain higher stats. The new features, like Relics and Ascension, are a direct answer to any backlash — they’re not outdating the strongest characters with the addition of new 7-Star characters, but they’re giving players new avenues to progress their current rosters while grinding to collect their way towards 7-Star rosters.

MCOC already features an abundance of resource types that are won with every battle fought, making every season feel rewarding. The addition of Ascension and Relic resources will add to the feeling of satisfaction and progress. Though the game already features character variants across multiple tiers, the Ascension vector will continue to blur the boundaries between the power rating of the different tiers, making it wholly possible that 6-Star characters start weaker than maxed out 5-Star characters. While this reduces chances of disengagement between abrupt power changes, it does dilute the urgency of getting the highest Star characters.

With the addition of more progress and reward vectors, supplementary social game modes, alliance features, and multiplayer dungeons like Incursions, the game greatly needs more avenues for auto-play and less active participation for what essentially boils down to grinding. This can start with improving and including auto-play across all game modes, not just event and story quests. The game can also lean a bit towards Scopley’s MSF monetization of VIPs by adding avenues to pull higher-tier characters with a low chance and higher premiums. This is a given as the game continues to add higher 7-Tier characters, but the Premium Hero Crystals only have access until Tier 4.

MCOC is on trend to remain the #1 top-grossing action game in the US for its 8th year in a row. Even with the abrupt changes in year 3 with its 12.0 patch, it took only a week for the game to jump back to its top-grossing position. Players are vocal, and change always comes with some discomfort, but the trend of making the game more stat-based than skill-based paid off in the environment of live service F2P products. With the future additions in line to build on this trend, and the MCU kicking off its most ambitious phases yet (link), MCOC is destined to continue its strong performance for years to come.

A big thanks to Harshal Karvande for writing this essay! If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.