Marvel vs. Capcom remains a strong performer for Capcom despite the lack of support and turmoil in the past decade
The Marvel vs. Capcom series is probably one of the most fondly remembered and cherished in the fighting game community despite its tumultuous past, present, and future which continues to influence and impact the scene.
Capcom recently updated their games sales figures for the last financial quarter which revealed that Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3's PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC re-release crossed the 1 million sales mark that, along with some boosted numbers for Infinite, appears to show the series still has life even without active support from the company.
It's very easy to get lost among the blockbusters of Monster Hunter and Resident Evil for the developer, but MvC has continued to truck on almost three years after its games have seen any sort of substantial updates.
Since Ultimate's re-release in early 2017, the Marvel franchise has sold 2.6 million copies. The Street Fighter franchise pushed 7 million games in that same period though it's also got over four times higher lifetime sales which is unsurprising as the company's flagship fighting game.
Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite is now the second-best selling singular release in the series at 1.5 million copies behind only the original launch of MvC3 on PS3 and Xbox 360 at 2.2 million.
As for the games Infinite has currently outsold, there's Ultra Street Fighter 4's initial release, the SF 30th Anniversary Collection, Ultimate Marvel 3 and MvC2's re-release in short order.
The whole MvC3 family including the latest release of Ultimate is now at 4.4 million total, plus whatever the PlayStation Vita version managed to sell, which is about half of what the SF4 series did in total.
That all may seem like nothing compared to Monster Hunter World's ridiculous 16.1 million, but in the context of the realm of fighting games, it's still a rare feat to achieve anywhere near that.
Fighting games which sold more than 1 million this generation could probably be counted on two hands between the likes of SF5, Tekken 7, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Mortal Kombat, Injustice and Pokkén Tournament.
Similar games with crossover appeal like BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle managed to sell around 500,000 or less and still be considered successes within their companies.
It's kinda impossible to know about the profitability of the Marvel vs. Capcom franchise since we don't know the licensing and business agreements in place, but there clearly remains a dedicated fan base along with those who are probably discovering the series for the first time in recent years because of Marvel's worldwide popularity.
Even Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is seeing more of a resurgence right now thanks to programs like Parsec making it more enjoyable to play online for new / returning weeklies, casuals and other tournament opportunities.
The developer / publisher has not touched the series pretty much since the beginning of 2018, and even with zero support, MvC games continued to sell over 1 million units.
Capcom initially planned on supporting Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite in tournament circuits, but Marvel wasn't too keen on the game, and thus official support was pulled from events like EVO. Capcom had much bigger plans for the game that never game to fruition, seemingly because Marvel wasn't happy with the final product that was released
We don't know what Marvel and Capcom's working relationship is like now following the launch and abandonment of Infinite, but there's clearly some doors still open considering Arcade1UP is releasing an MvC cabinet soon.
After all of the licensing issues, bad publicity, rocky launch and lack of official support for almost three years, Marvel still lives, and many fighting game developers would probably kill to have some of the numbers Ultimate and Infinite still pull in with zero push from either company.
The future of Marvel vs. Capcom remains a complete question mark, especially following the soon to be departure from producer Yoshinori Ono, but ultimately, the fans are still here and playing for what the series was and represents with hopes that there's still more great days ahead for this iconic crossover.
