NetEase celebrates Marvel Rivals success by sacking director and staff

Despite being the most successful new live service game in years, Chinese owner NetEase has laid off the American developers responsible for Marvel Rivals.

Online shooter Marvel Rivals is consistently in the top five most played games on Steam, often with over 300,000 concurrent players, and has been a massive hit on consoles too, with over 20 million free downloads.

Given how many live service games crash and burn almost instantly you’d imagine Chinese publisher NetEase would be over the moon with its performance. They probably are but their reward for the American team that made the game is not what you might imagine.

Game director Thaddeus Sasser posted on LinkedIn that, ‘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!’

It’s unclear exactly how many people have lost their jobs, and NetEase has made no official announcement, but most of Sasser’s initial LinkedIn post is him trying to get level designer Garry McGee a new job.

‘Welp, just got laid off from my job working on Marvel Rivals with NetEase,’ said fellow level designer Jack Burrows. ‘Was an enormous pleasure to work with my American co-workers who join me in this sad culling. Just couldn’t dodge that big boot I guess, no matter how big the success of the gig.’

‘Strange times all across the industry indeed,’ added McGee on LinkedIn.

All of them refer to the ongoing series of layoffs that have swept across the games industry for well over a year now, in part as a result of companies over-staffing during Covid, when they thought (or at least pretended to investors) that the popularity of video games would remain the same once lockdown ended.

Larger companies, such as Microsoft, Sony, and EA, have laid of hundreds, but that scale of cuts has subsided in recent months.

What’s especially baffling here is that Marvel Rivals is a live service game, so NetEase is going to be needing people to make new levels and other features for as long as it’s running.

The only assumption can be that, now the game’s established, they want to do it cheaper in China but that seems extremely shortsighted given Sasser and his team have already proven themselves.

The move may be the result of a wider shift at NetEase, as it’s made a number of cuts at its various Western studios recently, with Jar of Sparks (founded by Halo Infinite designer Jerry Hook), Worlds Untold (founded by Mass Effect writer Marc Walters), and Liquid Swords (founded by Avalanche Studios’ Christofer Sundberg) all suffering layoffs and being told to halt work.

Over 25,000 game developers are thought to have lost their jobs since 2023 and, clearly, there’s no end in sight. It’s especially worrying as it’s made clear that making a highly successful game doesn’t protect anyone from execs desperate for infinite growth at any cost.

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