Marvel Rivals Dissed by Ex Blizzard Director For Overwatch Similarities

As I'm sure you must've heard by now, NetEase has just launched Marvel Rivals, a team-based PVP shooter that immediately became a hit with the community and proved with its example that no, people are not, in fact, tired of hero shooters and Marvel-related products but rather of instances where those two are poorly executed.

While it might be a bit too early to call Rivals a success, given that the game is fresh out of the oven and doesn't even have a Metacritic score yet, the community's positive response is already clear as day in Rivals' concurrent player count, with over 440,000 players on Steam alone – not to mention the numbers on PS5 and Xbox, where the shooter is also available. 

But not everyone was won over by Marvel Rivals. At least one person's bitterness about the new title became so pronounced that it managed to make headlines and catch the attention of many gamers online – not just for the questionable arguments but also because of this person's identity.

The critic in question is none other than Blizzard's former director, Mike Ybarra, who reacted to the official reveal trailer for Black Widow – released shortly prior to the game itself – by calling the title "Overwatch Marvel Rivals," a thinly veiled accusation that NetEase had copied Blizzard's hero shooter. In his now-deleted tweet, Ybarra likened Rivals to Tencent's recently revealed Light of Motiram, which many lambasted for looking too similar to Sony's Horizon games, saying that NetEase and Tencent are "all the same."

While this jab might have some truth to it – since even though Sony itself apparently doesn't see LoM as a copy, the similarities are hard to ignore – the next one could arguably be considered one of the most chucklesome arguments the gaming industry has ever seen, with the ex-director attempting to strengthen his claim that Rivals is a rip-off by comparing its Black Widow to Overwatch's Widowmaker, suggesting that both characters being snipers and having "widow" in their names was proof like no other.

As is always the case with disputes, one bad argument spoils the bunch, and the community quickly dismissed Ybarra's accusations as him simply being salty about Rivals receiving so much praise. The original tweet was even Community Noted with a humorous clarification, pointing out that Marvel's Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Black Widow, first appeared in Tales of Suspense #52 in 1964 – half a century before Overwatch was released. Shortly after, Ybarra deleted his original post, but as we all know, the internet remembers everything:

Not mentioned in the Community Note is another piece of trivia that makes the plagiarism accusations even funnier – the fact that back in the day, Overwatch itself was accused on numerous occasions of being a blatant rip-off of Team Fortress 2 due to the similarities between some of their characters, their weapons, and the gameplay (let's not forget that in 2015-16, the genre in question was still fresh, with TF2 being the only strong player). So, as ridiculous as it may seem, an argument can be made that Widowmaker, Black Widow, and any other hero shooter sniper are all just imitations of the OG Sniper with a capital "S."

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