Image Credit: NetEase
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I’m sometimes embarrassed to admit it, but I scroll TikTok when I’m bored. TikTok is definitely full of cringe challenges, scripted couple content, annoying culture-stealing dances… But I can often tolerate most of it — most of it. There is one thing I can’t stand: Marvel Rivals’ gooner ads.
Every so often I’ll be mindlessly scrolling past performative men telling women to stop dating, people “surprising” waiters by speaking a different language… All the horrors of quasi-influencers. But then I’ll get a random animated ad featuring a Marvel superhero in a revealing swimsuit, her butt right in my face, and I’ll see it’s from the official Marvel Rivals account.
Welp, it’s time to stop scrolling.
Marvel Rivals Has Turned Into a Gooner Game
I think Marvel Rivals is getting desperate.
When Marvel Rivals came out last year, everyone immediately retracted their Overwatch 2 comparisons and decided it was the only hero shooter they were gonna play. For a while, it’s all my friends talked about and I even tried the game out myself so I could try to relive the glory days of the original Overwatch.
But I quickly got bored. The game felt sorta stale and repetitive, with many of the heroes not feeling very impactful and many overlapping abilities. It’s still a pretty good shooter game, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a reason that the player base has started to decline (though not by much).
Perhaps trying to get ahead of that inevitable drop in players, NetEase Games released revealing skins (for both sexes at least). At first, it was just a few. Just some cheeky one pieces. But as NetEase saw the response from its most thirsty players, it decided to lean into its characters’ assets and raise the skill ceiling for its gooner skins.
At this point, it’s gone from showing some buns beneath a cape if you stare at a certain angle to full-on bathing suit skins. The Psylocke bathing suit that basically gives her a wedgie in the front and back and the Loki banana hammock that shows all eight of his abs and his bulge… Diabolical.
But what really makes this worse is NetEase’s treatment of the skins. The ads with Psylocke’s butt right in my face are just crazy work. But it’s not only TikTok that gets this treatment from developers. On Reddit, there’s an image of Invisible Woman’s booty in the Malice skin with the caption: “When your teamwork is so tight, even Invisible Woman shows up.” Really NetEase?
I’m not offended that the characters are being sexualized really, although that’s clearly never really that great from a predominantly male community. We have Loki so Marvel Rivals really said, “Let’s just equally sexualize all Marvel heroes.” Rocket Raccoon next? But no, the real issue is how desperate NetEase is pushing it.
It’s just sad to see a game market itself more for its revealing skins rather than its gameplay. If you want to say “the world kept spinning” and “there are bigger problems” I’m not gonna argue. But some of us can care about multiple things just because they’re cringe and show a game’s desperation to be relevant.
I’m rooting for you, Marvel Rivals, but maybe focus more on your repetitive gameplay issue instead of getting sex-deprived teens to pay money to see animated butt cheeks.
Published: Aug 7, 2025 03:46 pm