Competitive shooters are at a crucial crossroads in 2025: 'sweaty' teamplay vs. casual fun

GamesFPSCompetitive shooters are at a crucial crossroads in 2025: ‘sweaty’ teamplay vs. casual funWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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marvel rivals

Gaze at the mountain of multiplayer shooters and tremble. I’ve long maintained that we’re in a multiplayer golden age—there have never beenmoreandbettershooters to choose from than we have right now, and most of them can be enjoyed entirely for free. If only anyone had the time.

If I had to describe the state of competitive shooters in 2025, it would be attention-starved. Every shooter is good, but the Faustian bargain we make for this age of plenty is that every shooter is alsoa lot. Battle passes, limited-time events, rotating stores, ranked resets—competitive shooters don’t just want a spot in your gaming rotation, they want to be your years-long obsession.

Some takeaways from a tumultuous year for competitive shooters as we slide into 2025:

The biggest shooters are pushing 10 years, or well past it already

The winners of the 2010s live service boom continue their long reign. In 2025, nearly every major shooter that was a big deal 8-10 years ago is still a big deal now.

The most-played competitive shooters (in no particular order) in 2025 and the year they came out:

Competitive FPS thankfully isn’t a winner-take-all genre, but it is a landscape that favors these long-established figures—competitive games with ranked modes that inherently ask you to become more competent in them over time, and trading in your hundreds or thousands of hours of expertise for something new is a steep proposition. Two shooters pulled the plug in 2024 (more on that below), but one did manage to hit big.

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Mister Fantastic giving a thumbs up

Marvel Rivals shows ‘hero shooter fatigue’ was never real

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Helldivers 2 Discord header image - four Helldivers celebrating side by side on a large rock

2024 was a big year for third-person shooters

Two major hits of 2024—Helldivers 2 and Marvel Rivals—are third-person shooters. When’s the last time that happened? Too small a sample to declare a trend (and we did have one FPS breakout in Delta Force), but it’s a good reminder that a new generation of 15-to-25-year-old shooter fans who grew up with Fortnite or PUBG might spur a third-person wave.

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Squid Games soldiers in masks

Crossovers are everywhere, and they’re driving prices up

When Hunt: Showdown, an extraction shooter that prides itself on its strong grimdark wild west setting, is releasing a Ghost Face bundle and designing an entire event around Post Malone, I know we’ve entered the age of the crossover. Just in the last couple years we’ve seen:

The Fortnite playbook is now the only playbook. While it’s increasingly impossible to predict what pieces of pop culture will show up next in our favorite shooters—I like to imagine there’s an annual IP auction where videogame execs bid on the rights to popstars, old movies, and Amazon Prime Originals—we’re seeing a solidified strategy in how these specialized cosmetics are sold.

(Image credit: Crytek)

Hunt: Showdown Post Malone’s Circus

In most cases, anyway. It was a real vibe killer when Helldivers 2 surprise dropped that neat Killzone stuff only for players to discover it cost almost double a usual warbond—the feedback was so bad thatArrowhead apologizedand gave away the second half of the crossover for free 24 hours later.

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Spectre Divide promo art

New ‘sweaty’ shooters aren’t very popular…

This year I watched two strong competitive FPSes come out and almost immediately drop off a cliff. The first was The Finals, which after getting a lot of attention during its beta, is now just barely hanging on in Steam’s most-played charts. Second was the accessible Counter-Strike-like Spectre Divide, which earned even less attention despite being the product of hardcore FPS player Shroud, who worked closely with and was an investor in the studio. I hate to see it, especially because The Finals is doing cool stuff with physics, destruction, and weapon choice that we’ve never seen in a multiplayer context, and Spectre’sbizarre “two bodies” concept totally works.

The outlier here is Deadlock, a Dota-adjacent shooter with fancy movement tech and some frankly insane character designs, but also doesn’t ask you to tap heads in the way that conventional, sweaty FPSes do. Deadlock spiked in popularity in September when Valve reluctantly made its beta semi-open to the public, but has waned from that peak since despite many updates. It’ll be interesting to see if Valve can migrate a substantial portion of Dota 2 and other players to Deadlock when it formally releases.

(Image credit: Team Jade)

Delta Force

…But there’s a renewed hunger for casual fun

Delta Force is best played while shooting the shit with your friends, and I’d argue Marvel Rivals shares that trait. Sure, it has a ranked mode and relies on teamwork just like Overwatch, but its heroes are so much more powerful on average, and winning doesn’t demand the same level of coordination. That could change as soon as this week’s season 1 patch, but for now, Rivals is benefitting from not being so concerned with balance—it’s hard to take the game seriously, so it’s easier to find the low-stakes fun.

That also mirrors the kinds of shooters I’ve gravitated toward lately. I played a lot of Big Team Battle in various Halo games last year, jumped back into Battlefield 2042 (which sold somewhere in the top 50-to-100 games on Steam in 2024, incredibly, according toValve’s ambiguous sales chart), and even stuck with Call of Duty longer than usual. Low stakes, constant respawns, a steady personal progression—maybe it’s just a phase, but I’m glad the social shooter is showing signs of life.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

xdefiant

XDefiant and Concord are two reasons why ‘good’ is not enough

I can’t sing about the virtues of casual shooters, respawns, and social play without talking about two times that approach failed recently. I had high hopes for Concord’s casual arena shooter modes, cool guns, and weird characters after the beta, but none of the pieces snapped together. It was OK, and I appreciated it was a $40 FPS with no microtransactions, but its only progression at launch was a bunch of cosmetics that were probably part of a battle pass at some point anyway. It just had no hook.

XDefiant is asadder story.Ubisoftput together a good Call of Duty alternative that was free, simple, and fun. It had a decent enough audience that it was never hard to find a match, but this time, good wasn’t good enough. The only identifiable lesson I take away from both games is that you can’t build a big-budget shooter expecting to peel away a huge audience from other big-budget shooters.

PRODUCTSMarvel RivalsDelta Force: Hawk OpsFortniteOverwatch 2ConcordXDefiantCounter-Strike 2Hunt: Showdown

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The biggest shooters are pushing 10 years, or well past it already#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

Marvel Rivals shows ‘hero shooter fatigue’ was never real#

2024 was a big year for third-person shooters#

Crossovers are everywhere, and they’re driving prices up#

New ‘sweaty’ shooters aren’t very popular…#

…But there’s a renewed hunger for casual fun#

XDefiant and Concord are two reasons why ‘good’ is not enough#