Marvel Rivals Director Announces Surprising Layoffs For NetEase Team
Is success not enough to prevent layoffs? The huge hero shooter Marvel Rivals appears to be facing some layoffs according to a few posts on LinkedIn.
NetEase, the developer behind the smash hit hero shooter Marvel Rivals has reportedly laid off one of its directors and an unknown number of other developers as well. In a post on LinkedIn, Thaddeus Sasser shared the news, writing: “This is such a weird industry… My stellar, talented team just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEast Games… and were just laid off!” It’s not yet clear why this has happened, especially as Marvel Rivals continues to find success in the few months since its launch in December.
Marvel Rivals director and team unexpectedly laid off despite success
Since launching in December, the newest hero shooter on the block, Marvel Rivals, has topped charts across PC and consoles. Its overwhelming popularity has even caused people to claim another popular hero shooter, Overwatch 2, to be “dead and gone” when faced with its newest competition. At the time of writing this, Marvel Rivals is the number three most played game on Steam with over 230 thousand players in-game right now, with a 24-hour peak of over 300 thousand. All signs point to Marvel Rival’s success, so why are we seeing layoffs?
Over the last few years, especially in 2024, the gaming industry has been riddled with many attempts at entering the live-service space. A live-service game is a game constantly updated with new content that continually draws further purchases from players, essentially becoming a consistent source of revenue for developers. Of course, there are the best examples of this in games like Fortnite and League of Legends, but there are more recent triumphs as well.
Helldivers 2 was a huge, and unexpected, success in early 2024 that continues to draw in big numbers of players to this day. Marvel Rivals might be the most successful in recent times, with a new update announced today that will bring the final two Fantastic Four characters to the ever-expanding roster. But there have been just as many, if not more, live-service flops over the last few years too. Perhaps most infamous of all is another hero shooter, Concord, which was completely removed from sale within two weeks of launching. Ubisoft recently announced that arena-shooter XDefiant would be shutting down later this year amid studio closures and layoffs. WB Games has had two major games, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and MultiVersus, announce the end of development as well.
So why is this happening to one of the Marvel Rivals teams? There is very little we know right now other than the fact that this is happening. Perhaps the levels of success we are seeing, huge player counts, are not delivering in a way that NetEase expected, or maybe now that the game has launched NetEase is choosing to take the game in a slightly different direction. For now, we will have to wait to see if more information comes out in this developing situation. At the time of writing, it appears that NetEase game has not commented on the layoffs.
Level designer Jack Burrows also shared the news on LinkedIn, writing: “Just couldn’t dodge that big boot I guess, no matter how big the success of the gig.” Burrows continued to explain that he was looking for a new role. It’s not clear exactly how many people are affected by this layoff and confusion and surprise will likely continue until we learn more.
