‘Marvel Rivals’ Layoffs Baffle Everyone After The Game Is A Massive Hit

Yesterday was a dichotomy of a day for Marvel Rivals, as it officially showed off its two new heroes, The Thing and Human Torch, and released a slew of patch notes arriving with the upcoming season 1.5.

But the other side of the coin was the announcement that NetEase had laid off a number of people working on Marvel Rivals, in fact closing an entire US support division. A few social media posts, especially one spread by director Thaddeus Sasser, spread like wildfire and launched fans and devs into a frenzy about how awful this industry could be if a massive success like Marvel Rivals was still leading to layoffs. Here’s Sasser, who also seems baffled:

“This is such a weird industry…My stellar, talented team just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase Games…and were just laid off!”

He goes on to promote fellow fired employee Garry McGee and it appears he will begin advocating for his other team members specifically in short order.

One problem with this story is that there was a lot of misinformation floating around about exactly what was happening here. Not that it makes the situation better, but a few things should be cleared up.

Thaddeus Sasser was not the highest-up director of Marvel Rivals, rather he was a game director that worked on budgets and staff, not the creative director who is the China-based Guangyun Chen. The size of the US team that was cut is six people, a loss to be sure, but by last count, NetEase has 29,128 employees (it’s unknown how many are working on Rivals specifically).

Still, this felt emblematic of an industry where you can work hard to make a huge success and then be cut out within a few months for unclear reasons, and it would cost a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of revenue to keep this US division on. Later, NetEase issued the following statement about the situation:

There were some weird posts from a community manager on Discord trying to stop the “spread of false rumors” and accusing spectators of not “knowing what the structure is like within the Rivals dev team.” He continued, “I’m simply saying this because it’s phrased wrongly by the media initially, totally funny.” He goes on to say they will not “lose touch” with the Western audience, as they frequently have meetings with the US-based Marvel about the game.

It’s just a bad situation all around. Even if it’s not mass layoffs or the top of the entire game being cut, it’s still a stark reminder of how expendable devs can feel even if they produce one of the biggest live service successes in recent history. It’s a shame.

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