Maximillian Dood Puts Up a $10,000 Bounty for UMvC3 Rollack

If you ask long time fighting game players about which games they love the most, one of the most common answers you will hear is "Marvel." You might get a more specific answer, like Marvel vs Capcom 2 or Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, but it's still going to be "Marvel," because these games single-handedly defined a genre and become a true classic. The "heart and soul" of the FGC as some would even call it.

The latter might be an exaggeration if we speak for global FGC, but it definitely has a special place for NA scene in particular. MvC2 and UMvC3 were the games that pulled in a lot of new players who went on to become the biggest names in competitive fighting games.

Sadly, Capcom has largely neglected these titles over the years, either because they don't see value in them, or because the Marvel licensing makes any actions way more tricky. It took a long time just for the MvC2 to get official rollback support as part of a collection, and UMvC3 still exists in a purgatory.

There was a brief glimpse of UMvC3 getting rollback back in 2023 when a few modders figured out how to simulate multiple instances of the game within 1 frame, but that seemingly never got anywhere, with the account that initially posted it vanishing into the ether.

Not to sour the excitement, but it helps to stay realistic. Many responses to this announcement display a frankly naive level of confidence. Don't get it twisted, ten thousand US dollars is a huge sum of money. Can be outright life-changing for some people.

However, if we're talking about the amount of skill and time required to retrofit rollback onto a game from 2011, this is a drop in the bucket. Famously, it took MKX 4-12 working for 9 months full time to add rollback to that game.

Without exact numbers it's hard to throw out a good estimate, but let's lowball it. Take those minimum 4 workers. Now take an average monthly salary of a software engineer. Multiple websites put it at roughly ~$130k. That's $10.8k a month for 4 people, for 9 months, which gives us a total of $388,800.

Now imagine doing that work, putting in all that time, for a $10k bounty, does that sound appealing? Keep in mind, this isn't criticism towards Max, he's a great guy for putting his money where his mouth is and creating at least some sort of financial incentive. This is merely a reminder that retrofitting rollback onto a relatively modern video game is a lot of work.

Some will point out that many other fan projects essentially did it for free for many different fighting games, but aside from CCCaster by MadScientist and Guilty Gear (modern Unity port version of PC original) by WistfulHopes a.k.a. Ryn, the majority of rollback projects share one thing in common. They were all made utilizing the incredible advancements of emulators. 

Even with Xbox 360 and PS3 emulation making massive leaps, modern games still have many challenges when it comes to enabling rollback netplay. No two cases are similar, and there is so much work to be done.

So, don't lose hope, but don't treat this as some done deal just because there is a nice bounty to claim.