Marvel Rivals Developers Laid Off Despite the Game’s Apparent Success

If you make games, the games industry will inevitably chew you up like Galactus feasting on a planet. That’s what it does. Even if your game’s a hit, you’re not guaranteed any job security. Take Marvel Rivals: Marvel’s answer to Overwatch-style hero shooters was one of the more successful game launches of 2024, and has a long roadmap of announced updates and additions on the way. And yet this week its North American development team was hit with news that’s all too common in this industry. NetEase Games, the China-based company behind Marvel Rivals, has laid off the game’s North American team.

The news started to spread after Thaddeus Sasser, the game’s director, posted about it on LinkedIn earlier this afternoon. Jack Burrows, a level designer, also wrote a LinkedIn post about it, and confirmed multiple employees were impacted, mentioning his “American coworkers who join [him] in this sad culling.” And a post on BlueSky indicates that all six of the game’s U.S.-based developers were now out of a job.

There’s no word on if the Chinese team that worked on Marvel Rivals alongside the American team was impacted, but there’s been no news about a delay in the game’s next midseason, which is scheduled to launch next week. Given somebody, somewhere, is needed to keep live service games like this one running, it’s possible NetEase will be moving Marvel Rivals entirely beneath the umbrella of its Chinese team. That’s resulted in speculation that this could be part of a larger strategy of moving NetEase business out of North America, which, given the trade war that our leaders have decided to start, makes sense. 

By all accounts Marvel Rivals is a hit. It reportedly earned over $130 million in its first month, and it’s averaging almost 300,000 hourly concurrent players a month since launch. Just based on the amount of articles published about the game by our colleagues in the gaming press, it’s clear that there’s a large, dedicated audience for this game, even though it just came out two months ago. These clearly aren’t performance-based layoffs. It’s demoralizing, though, to see that even launching a hit game can’t save you from the constant cycle of Thanos snaps that is the games industry, which has shed over 25,000 jobs since the start of 2023.