Marvel Contest of Champions joined the Marvel x Moonrock Gaming Lounge at San Diego Comic-Con 2026 to host game demos, daily competitions, and giveaways. I was able to drop by the booth to chat about the game and its new Towers mode with Kabam’s Social Media & Community Manager Brendan McGuire and Live Operations Specialist Cory Rupert.
If you’re unfamiliar with Marvel Contest of Champions, it’s a superhero fighter that’s available on mobile and for PC, both on Steam and direct from the MCOC website, and that first debuted 12 years ago. It’s been continually expanding its roster since launch, and now boasts over 350 available characters. When I asked how deep did Kabam have to dig into Marvel’s catalog of heroes to build a roster that big, they told me:
“That's a great, great question. We actually have some original characters as well, right? We have Venom the Duck, which is a venomized Howard the Duck. And Symbiote Supreme, which is a venomized Doctor Strange. Now, a good 95 to 98% of the champions are original Marvel characters. We have our Spider-Man characters, we have our Spider-Ham, Spider-Gwen, and all those really popular characters. But we also have some lower tier and popularity champions like Shocker and Sauron. Those are like for the real comic nerds, right? Ruby Thursday is another great example here, but my favorite example here is Rintrah. This guy was in Multiverse of Madness for about 30 seconds and he's such a powerful character. We also had Hit Monkey before the TV show and he was very obscure at the time of launch.”
“Throughout the calendar year we add about 24-25 champions. You've got to imagine balancing that with some of the A-listers that people want to see, some of the more obscure champions. A lot of our fans really like the obscure stuff that we do, so we try to play into that as much as we can.”
Towers mode was added as a celebration of those 12 years of roster growth. While you can play with characters from your roster in a variety of modes, Towers is the first mode designed to put your entire roster on display. You pick any of the characters from your roster and add one of them to each of the tower’s tiers to create a fight ladder. Your opponents will be set for you, so you’re just picking your own squad to complete the tower.
Complete the first fight on the ladder and you automatically move right into the next fight that you set-up. And if you need a break at any point, you can leave and later you’ll pick-up right where you left off. It’s bite-sized content that lets you play for progression without making the time commitment that you would for a long quest. Even the fights themselves are short – they are given a timer and if you don’t win in time, you’ve lost the fight and it’s over.
“You're not fighting against another person. You are playing against yourself and really celebrating the roster that you've built for 12 years. Yeah, and if you only have two minutes to go through, you could do like four or five fights, and then the rest of those fights in that block, you save them for later. They won't reset your progress.”
Okay, so what's at the end of the tower?
“That's a great question. We have class towers that play into our class rule, and challenge towers that are going to be a little bit more difficult for some of our more engaged players. Like with all things in Marvel Classes of Champions, there are some rewards at the end of the tower. It’s our competitive style, right? We have ranked rewards that pay out every 28 days. So that's really great, because what happens here is that this celebrates the work you've already done consistently. So, if you're placed in the top 250 on the leaderboard, every 28 days you're getting 140,000 of our competitive resource. That's pretty great, right? So, you're getting that active payout for a moment that you're always engaging with based on your roster. Towers never reset, so you don't have to go through the grinding. But as you build out the top end of your roster, you can push even further.”
You mentioned class towers; how do those work?
“So, the way MCOC works is it's really built around the classes. Six different classes, right? You have all six classes here that are going to go in. But there are multiple, multiple levels of the towers, over 100 levels for each class tower, and there are six. So, hundreds of blocks.”
“And today we're showing off our new event towers. That's going to be easier, more bite-sized casual content. The player just kind of casually goes through, since they’re more theme-based, like Spider-Verse themed. You go in, you choose which one you want to do, and you get some rewards.”
Okay, so the idea is once you play through all the base towers, then you continue through the event and challenge towers?
“We have a very, very large and committed player base to Marvel Contest of Champions. Some of them are super core. Some of them are more casual. Some of them watch the MCU, and they have a couple of favorite characters that they want to play. That's what, like, the class towers and the event towers are for. Then we have some extremely talented competitive players. That's where we're really keying into the challenge towers. Of course, they're all open to everybody, and we encourage everyone to try everything. But super high-skilled, stressful gameplay is not going to be for everybody who downloads a Marvel game, so we want to make sure we have content that supports everybody's needs.”
“The great thing about towers is that class towers, at least, you can access class towers from the moment you download the game. This is one of the only pieces of content that is available from the very, very beginning. Challenge towers, you have to get to a bit of a higher progression level. For the challenge towers, you can play a couple and come back later, too. You can play two fights today and come back in four years if you want.”
Are the other aspects of the game outside of Towers still going to get new content?
“Oh, absolutely. This is not replacing anything. Twelve years in and we're adding more stuff still. More, honestly, more, I would say, more new features and new content. We've released more in the calendar year of 2026 than we have in the past five individual years. Twelve years into this game and we'll release more content than ever.”