The Marvelous Monetization of Marvel’s Contest of Champions

Digital Extremes, Grinding Gear Games, and Hoyoverse are just a few of the big names in mobile and live service that I have covered. Yet, a single mobile game stands out for its enduring popularity, continuous evolution through new content, and yearly revenue in the millions. In terms of gameplay and monetization, Kablam’s Marvel Contest of Champions is exceptionally unique.

A multiverse of fighting

Contest of Champions is an early mobile game that showcased evolving mobile design trends of the 2010s and capitalized on the Marvel hype. There have been other Marvel games, and even DC ones as well, but it is this one that dominated the market.

Our story is that all the Marvel heroes and villains have been brought to the multiversal arena of Battleworld by the force of the Collector. The Collector compels them to fight each other across time and space, and as “the summoner,” the player battles with their own roster of characters. As the story progresses, the game introduces new characters; most betray the player, and these characters continue to grow in power.

The Contest's gameplay set it apart from other games, even among DC and Marvel variants available at the time. This is not a turn-based game but one of the first examples of the mobile fighting game genre. You fight your opponent in real-time using light, medium, and heavy attacks, along with the ability to block and parry. Each character has up to three levels of special moves, the third being a cinematic attack that players cannot block. The game assigns different classes to characters, creating strengths and weaknesses between them in line with mobile RPG mechanics.

If that were all the game offered, it wouldn’t be so complicated to play. However, this game introduces layers of complexity that rival even the most intricate fighting and RPG games. Every character has unique passives and abilities tailored to their playstyle. For example, Venom gains randomized buffs every few seconds and can consume the opponent’s buffs for health regeneration. The Immortal Hulk (yes, every Marvel variant has its own character) can become immortal when he’s about to die, allowing him to keep fighting. And there are a lot more rules—a lot. As the game progresses, an array of passives that radically alter how you approach battles will continue to influence gameplay.

When you first start encountering them, the passives are basic — enemy hits harder, enemy has more health. For those doing the high-end challenges, passives become a short novel to read to understand everything that they affect.

Bang for your buck

The unique selling point in terms of gameplay for Contest of Champions is its progression. Mobile and live service games often feature a never-ending grind, with new challenges requiring players to constantly improve their numbers to keep up. While leveling up is a big part of this game (and part of the grinding), the real focus for players is completing the story.

While the story may not win any best narrative awards, it provides account-wide rewards and progression to keep players engaged. Each "milestone" earned through gameplay upgrades the player’s account, granting access to better deals, enhanced shop rewards, and improved event rewards during holiday or anniversary events. This is one of the best implementations of story and account progression tied to player rewards I’ve seen in a while.

This piece will explore elements influenced by the player’s milestone progress. This additionally connects to the many events in the progression (in which there are a lot of them).

Continued contesting

While the game modes center on a linear set of missions, players can also participate in events, PvP, guild battles, and more. The game ties everything together by offering resources and currency for character recovery and progression items. Developers also introduce limited-time, highly challenging content to test the skills of players who think they’ve mastered the game.

This connection ties directly to the monetization we’ll discuss next. Outside of the story missions, events feature difficulty settings based on account progress. The intent is to ensure that, regardless of an account’s overall level, there are comparable rewards for participation. For instance, completing an event with four-star champions will yield rewards suited to that tier. However, there’s a catch: account growth requires ambitious actions, often revealing some devious monetization mechanics.

Marvel’s mega multiverse monetization

Having analyzed mobile games for over seven years and authored a book on F2P design, I can say with absolute certainty: Contest of Champions is one of the greediest live-service games I’ve encountered. This isn’t just about the potential money spent—it’s also about the amount of items available for purchase with real money or in-game currency.

Every single service, resource, and game mode has a scheme designed to get players to spend money—maybe a little, maybe a lot, but it’s there. The game’s premium currency, Units, acts as a universal “skip the grind” feature and is also used to purchase summoning crystals. Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the gacha system yet.

There are currently up to seven-star versions of characters in the game. Keeping with the focus on progression, if someone is going through the game’s story acts, you will start with two–three stars, work to unlock four stars, and continue to push up.

Players can buy multiple summoning crystals, or they can find shards through questing to build one. Basic crystals will offer a range of stars — with the higher rewards having a far lower drop chance. Typically, for finishing an act, the player will get a free crystal of either the star rank or higher to help them move forward. The game features crystals for specific character backgrounds or for a character’s introduction year; the best crystals are the “nexus” crystals, offering players three or more randomized reward choices. There are also crystals for acquiring random amounts of resources and free daily crystals based on the player’s story progress.

Unlike other live service games, spending units on summoning is the worst-case scenario for an account, and this gets at one of the sneakier aspects of this game. With spending units to buy crystals, the quality of the crystal has no bearing on the cost per unit. Attempting a five-star summon costs the same as pulling for a two-to-four stars. More specialized summoning crystals cost even more units.

As a free player or light spender, you can progress much faster, and the game’s developers have tuned progression over the years to improve the early acts’ questing and rewards. For example, there are no more class gates in the main quest that require the player to have specific classes to go down those routes.

However, there is a catch. Once your progress stalls, the game slows to a crawl in several ways. The most apparent is with energy.

Given all the different events, stories, and daily resource grinding, the game barely gives you enough energy. Additionally, tackling harder challenges and story maps demands increasingly more energy. When you start, it costs one energy a step; eventually, it will go to two, and some quests will cost four energy to take a single step. But wait, a 4.99 monthly subscription gets you bonus energy or units to refill your energy bar.

Let’s say you reach a point where your champions are not leveled enough, and you need to rank them up to increase their stats — starting from four-star champions, you can rank each character up to five times (seven stars go up to six). At higher star levels, each rank-up requires three different resources, which must be farmed from various mission types, besides gold (the game’s currency) and ISO-8 (the experience resource). The game doesn’t give the player the rarest resources in whole units; you have to grind repeatedly to get enough material to equal one unit, and often you will need four or more for a single rank-up. And this is in addition to the every-rising resource demands for leveling up characters before ranking (though using units bypasses this).

There is also another form of character grinding. Once you pull a duplicate of the same character at the same star rating, you “awaken” them, which unlocks a character-exclusive perk. For some characters, these perks are just okay. For others, it’s the defining part of their kit that makes them worth using. However, unless you buy or get a reward of a free awakening gem, you must keep pulling to unlock and level up their masteries. There are gems that can also add mastery points, but getting them is going to depend on completing harder quests and the luck of the gacha.

In-game, higher-ranked, lower-star characters frequently outperform lower-ranked, higher-star characters in terms of stats. This lets players use their best lower-star characters for current content.

However, since your character unlocks are going to be completely RNG, new and free players will probably have a diverse but unpredictable selection of characters. The power disparity between bad, good, and great characters is very wide. This becomes a factor when you deal with fights that have different damage over time (or DOT) attacks.

Champions have different resistances or immunities to status effects such as bleed, poison, and shock. Without them, your characters will take constant unrecoverable damage during a fight. Then there are conditional fights that actively punish/reward certain strategies. When characters are KO’d or you need to heal them, you need to use up your healing potions and revives. This requires grinding the content to earn more or spending units. Units also allow you to purchase character and account boosts that offer more ways to help your characters. Once the stat disparity gets high enough, you can easily lose a character from one full combo from the opposing enemy, sometimes within half a second of loading up the fight.

Due to the resource grind, investing time, energy, and money into fully ranking up a few four-star champions isn’t ideal for progression once you have access to five- and six-star champions. The game addresses this with yet another daily grind in the form of co-op maps and arenas. In these modes, characters used must “rest” for 24 hours before they can be used again—unless you spend units to speed up the process. These game modes generate their own currencies, which players can use for purchases, as well as special items available exclusively through guild (or “alliance” in Contest) activities.

You might think this covers every possible way to spend money, correct? Nope—we’re not done yet. The game will generate limited-time offers based on your progress or what you’ve done. If you pull a four-star character, the game will immediately give you a one-hour promotional deal for five-star summoning shards. Funny enough, the cost per unit for this deal decreases as your milestone rank improves. Hitting certain achievements may result in a pricey mega-deal that unlocks access to one of the game’s best characters and offers more summoning chances. While it’s great to have a high-star character, it’s crucial to reiterate that without the ability to upgrade them, how they can be used is limited.

But wait, there’s more!

You can now purchase a $24.99 season pass, as well as take advantage of multiple daily, weekly, and seasonal deals, with two more purchases I have yet to reveal. Among the monthly subscriptions that boost your energy and gold, the most significant one is the summoner’s sigil. For $9.99 a month (with it going up after the first month), you get access to special daily quests to obtain better resources, faster energy recharge, a fancy title, and the biggest pay-to-win aspect of the game — the black ISO market. This shop is only available to those who purchase the sigil, providing easier resource access and special offers that you cannot find anywhere else (this is not a hyperbole). Some exclusive events are only available if you have the sigil at that time.

You may be thinking that all these purchases are just there as an optional deal, but I still have one more monetization angle to bring up.

As you level up, you’ll gain mastery points that allow you to unlock perks. The advantages can be anywhere from 'meh' to necessary, like the chance to gain invincibility when back dashing to avoid enemy attacks. If you want to invest more, you must buy different varieties of another resource with units to unlock those nodes (a fixed number of rewards for the side content), and then spend additional units per level mastery of them.

Until your account is sufficiently secured in terms of mastery and story progression, you do not want to be spending units on rolls. Given the nature of the game and the reward system, it is often best to play heavily during major events and holidays to get the best daily rewards and free resources.

The entire monetization of Contest of Champions is intertwined with the progression of the player’s account, and the game entices players to spend units. As you move further up in terms of story missions, the frequency and amount of units earned gets smaller, as the number of things you can spend them on goes up. Running out of units is like running out of gas in your car. If that happens to you and there are no more missions to complete for additional resources, your chances of gathering sufficient amounts will be go down. On top of that, every promotional deal and shop purchase is further influenced by what milestone rating the player is on. If you are a lower story rank, sales in the shop will give you fewer resources compared to being at a higher rank, but still charge the player the same amount.

Those who understand the game can accomplish much without using units excessively or smartly spending them. Purchasing the wrong things can lead to account ruin for new players and those unaware. Most players will never reach a point where grinding is complete, even the luckiest ones will still have to invest time or money to progress their characters.

This brings me to the dichotomy of this game and the reason for its continued success after a decade of development.

The skill threshold

If Contest of Champions was just a simple game to play, none of the extensive monetization I discussed would matter, as most people would not play it. However, what makes it so intriguing is that there is a lot of depth to this game in terms of character progression, building teams, and the advanced challenges are some of the most complex you will find for this kind of genre.

Every character feels different to use, despite the simplified control scheme of playing on mobile. The developers continue to add in new forms of progression and challenge on top of everything else you can do in it. Since the last time I played it, the developers added a new feature called relics, which offer further customization and introduce a new additional attack that players can trigger during combat.

If you were to ask any veterans of the game if spending money replaces skill, they would say no. Once you get to the higher challenges in the game, the power disparity between the highest your characters can reach will not even come close to what the enemy can do. I’m talking 8 to 10 times higher in terms of power rating. If you don’t learn how to build a team or deal with the AI, no amount of money will save you. If you are good at this game, it is possible to do content that would take an average player weeks to achieve in a few days.

With all of this considered, I am sure that fans will come to argue my points about the game being pay-to-win. However, pay-to-win is not a binary option. The tuning of different game aspects either subtly encourages or forcefully requires players to spend money to continue playing. With that said, Contest of Champions is heavily “tuned” to get money out of its player base.

In mobile gaming, it’s common to categorize a game as either a main game or a side game based on the daily dedication required to play. Contest of Champions is definitely a main game if you want to fully experience everything it offers—story mode, limited events, arena play, alliance maps, battlegrounds, excursions, and likely more that I’m forgetting. This means if you want to play one or two mobile games and nothing else, you are set. Between other games, indie games, writing, and creating design videos, there is not enough time to invest in another daily.

That limits me in terms of resources unless I spend money or units to overcome that. At the moment, there is just a wide gap between those who can spend and those who cannot. You might not feel it at the start, but once you reach that point where your resources run out, you’ll feel it, trust me.

As I am typing this, I’m in an awkward position in terms of power. I have six-star characters who are all ready to rank up, but I’m half an act away from reaching the rank of cavalier (which is the next bump in terms of power and unlocking the resource I need to farm to rank up). If I rank up five-star units, I’m burning through energy and resources that will eventually reach a cap in terms of what I can do with them. So, I need to complete three quests using under-stat characters where the bosses of each could just sneeze on my characters to finish them.

The game Contest of Champions is a prime example of how a game can fully use its platform and monetization system for high profit, highlighting the potential and limits of monetization design. I’m hard-pressed whether to recommend you check this one out, as it will come to steam soon.

In terms of recommendations, I think the game needs to improve the daily play for mid-level accounts (which begins around Act 5). There should be better ways to keep up with the resource spend and grind that doesn’t involve arena and coop modes. I also think there needs to be some kind of trimming of the monetization, especially around healing and retrying content. Wasted resources won’t sting veteran and skilled players, unlike new and developing players who face punishment from irreplaceable resource loss. While they made the beginning of the game far better, the jump from early to mid-progression still feels terrible unless you get lucky with good champions.

Part of the problem is that once you get into the mid-ish game (Act 5 and beyond) the passives become more specific in terms of their solutions. For example: an enemy who is immune to all debuffs heals every few seconds, and the only way to actually beat him is to do enough damage to burn him down. But if you lack a champion who meets that criterion, there is nothing you can do. Some of the worst RPG design examples come to mind: enemies that are designed to counter specific builds, but you cannot get a new character whenever you need one.

It’s funny looking at the monetization of Contest of Champions compared to more recent entries, like the aformentioned HoYoverse. Eastern-based mobile games are far more designed around their gacha/characters being the primary driver for money and downplay the spending on other aspects of the design. You are supposed to show off your cool new characters whenever you can.

Here, while characters are important, it’s more vital for a player to have a “healthy” account of champions upgraded and have enough units to keep going. There needs to be a way for a free or unlucky player to gradually earn sufficient resources to rank up their characters after reaching the five/six-star requirements. Contest of Champions is a game that offers a lot of content, but the paywall is the size of Mt. Everest or [insert Marvel reference here].