Nine days out. That is where we are with Invincible VS, the 3v3 tag fighter from brand-new Skybound-owned studio Quarter Up, which launches April 30, 2026 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. After a successful open beta that ran April 9 through April 11 and collected over a million unique logins across platforms, the studio has now locked its 18-character launch roster, confirmed its post-launch content roadmap, and dropped its final release date trailer featuring the last new character to be revealed before launch. The fighting game community has been watching this one closely, and with good reason.
Quarter Up is not a random new studio. The company was founded in Los Angeles by several senior members of the team that made Killer Instinct (2013), widely considered one of the most mechanically sophisticated fighting games of the last decade, and Invincible VS is the first game they have shipped under the new banner. It is also the first fully in-house production from Skybound Games, which previously acted mostly as a publisher for licensed Invincible content. The stakes are meaningful for both sides.
The open beta trailer above gives you a reasonable taste of the fundamentals. Fast assists, aggressive air-dashes, and the kind of supers-spending-super-spending-super exchanges that define the Marvel vs. Capcom school of 3v3 tag fighter. But Invincible VS is not just riding on a comparison to a beloved subgenre. Quarter Up has been signaling for months that the game has its own distinct mechanical identity, and the beta backed that up.
An 18-Character Launch Roster Anchored by the Viltrumites
Quarter Up confirmed in late March that Invincible VS will launch with 18 playable characters, a number that sits right in the middle of what modern 3v3 tag fighters typically ship with at day one. Dragon Ball FighterZ launched with 24, Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite with 30, and BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle with 20, so 18 is a reasonable if not ambitious starting point. What matters, of course, is how the roster plays, and the beta made a strong first impression.
The headline fighters are the Viltrumites, a group that includes Mark Grayson himself (Invincible, voiced by series lead Steven Yeun), his father Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons), and a small handful of other Viltrumite antagonists from the show. These characters are deliberately overtuned in the flight and power-strike departments but carry meaningful weaknesses in ground mixups and throw escapes, which is the kind of design philosophy that keeps a fighting game's top tier interesting rather than degenerate.
Beyond the Viltrumites, the roster includes Atom Eve, Allen the Alien, Rex Splode, Dupli-Kate, Monster Girl, Titan, Powerplex, Conquest, Battle Beast, Bulletproof, Robot, Ella Mental, and a handful of surprise additions that the studio has asked reviewers not to spoil ahead of launch. Ella Mental is particularly notable because she is an original character created for the game by Invincible creators Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker, not a pull from the existing comics. Her kit, built around psychic projection and ranged zoning, fills one of the more obvious gaps in the open beta lineup.
The Conquest Mode and a Real Story Campaign
Fighting games have spent the last decade learning, sometimes painfully, that single-player content matters. Mortal Kombat 1 and Street Fighter 6 both shipped with ambitious campaign modes, and Invincible VS is following that playbook closely. The game ships with Conquest, an original story campaign that Quarter Up describes as a full six-to-eight-hour narrative featuring animated cutscenes, boss fights against unique AI patterns, and a branching progression path that encourages replays with different characters.
Voice acting in Conquest pulls from the animated series' cast, which is a meaningful upgrade from the comic-adaptation fighting games of the past. Kirkman is credited as a creative consultant on the story, and he has publicly said that the Conquest narrative is considered canon-adjacent to the animated series rather than a separate what-if scenario. That decision alone puts Invincible VS in a different category from most licensed fighters.
The rollback netcode, which has been the single biggest complaint about licensed fighting games for the last five years, has been tested extensively during the two beta weekends. Early tournament-level players have reported consistent one-to-two-frame delay on cross-region matches, which is about as good as rollback gets. Quarter Up has confirmed that the launch build includes further netcode refinements on top of the beta build.
Post-Launch Content and Season Pass Details
Skybound has confirmed a Season 1 Pass featuring four post-launch characters, with the first two (Thragg and an unrevealed new character) arriving in the first three months after launch. Season 1 also adds two new stages and a ranked-mode overhaul that the studio has been working on based on beta feedback. The base game retails at $59.99, with the Season 1 Pass priced at $29.99 and a Deluxe Edition bundling both for $79.99.
The game is not launching on Nintendo Switch 2 at release, but Skybound has confirmed a Switch 2 version is in development and targeting late 2026. Xbox players get the game on day one of Game Pass, which makes Invincible VS one of the most notable Game Pass day-one releases of the month.
For a new studio, a licensed property, and a genre where single big names (Capcom, Arc System Works, NetherRealm) have dominated for decades, Invincible VS has the weight of being a genuine alternative. Nine days from now we will find out whether Quarter Up's Killer Instinct pedigree translates into something that can stand alongside the genre's best. The early signs are more encouraging than anyone expected.
