Marvel Rivals‘ bumper season one update has quietly shut down all mods for the hero-shooter.
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Marvel Rivals was one of the surprise hits of 2024 and its popularity has continued into 2025. Last week, the game launched a massive season one update that made significant changes to a number of heroes to help with the balance of the multiplayer fighting game. Half of The Fantastic Four were made available as playable characters while new maps were also added to the game.
However, not included in the patch notes was an update that has seemingly blocked all mods for Marvel Rivals.
Since the game launched in December, players have been using mods to customise their heroes. Users turned Mantis into a goth, switched out The Punisher for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ Big Smoke and replaced several Marvel characters with their DC counterparts.
Many of the creations on Nexus Mods had been downloaded thousands of times. It’s been reported that since season one launched last week, those mods no longer work thanks to a new “asset hash checking” tool.
Bro there’s a Skibidi Toilet skin mod on Marvel Rivals already pic.twitter.com/S3V5bfea6L
— Neon (@HeyNe0n) December 27, 2024
Speaking to IGN about the latest update, developer NetEase said: “It is not recommended to modify any game files, as doing so carries the risk of getting banned.”
“The fact that mods worked in the first place had to have been unintended. I’m honestly surprised that nobody got banned because of them,” wrote one player on Reddit, with the free-to-play Marvel Rivals earning a bulk of its money from paid skins. “Makes sense. You don’t bring your own food into a restaurant,” added another.
Not everyone is as understanding though. “The annoying part is that there were mods to skip past all the annoying startup logos and videos. They disabled mods but didn’t add an option to skip the 30 seconds of bullshit every time you start this game,” explained one fan. “This sucks. Really liked having Spiderman yell about putting dirt in my eye and all the other cool mods,” said another.
Since the update launched on Friday (January 10) though, new mods have appeared on Nexus Mods that reportedly work with the new version of Marvel Rivals.
Marvel Rivals season one has seen the game reach a new record of concurrent players on Steam as well. Shortly after the update went live, more than 644,000 players logged on at the same time, while the 24 hour peak is currently 522,899 players. Prior to season one, Marvel Rivals’ concurrent player peak was 480,000 (via SteamDB).
In other news, Nintendo has finally acknowledged a number of leaks about the upcoming Switch 2 and debunked them as “not official”.
The post ‘Marvel Rivals’ season one update shuts down mods appeared first on NME.
