Free-to-play hero shooter Marvel Rivals has been a huge success for publisher NetEase, smashing through the 20m player barrier just weeks into its launch and still regularly attracting over 250K daily concurrent players on Steam. But that hasn’t been enough to stop NetEase from making lay offs across the US development team that helped land it a hit.
Marvel Rivals game director Thaddeus Sasser broke the news of job cuts at NetEase’s Seattle-based studio in a post shared on LinkedIn. “This is such a weird industry,” he wrote. “My stellar, talented team just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase Games… and were just laid off!”
Sasser didn’t say how many people have lost their jobs following NetEase’s decision – Eurogamer has reached out to the publisher for clarification – but Marvel Rivals level designers Jack Burrows and Garry McGee both confirmed they’d been affected in separate posts.
“Welp, just got laid off from my job working on Marvel Rivals with NetEase,” Burrows wrote. “Was an enormous pleasure to work with my American coworkers 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.”