A hero shooter like Concord can come along and completely fail to grab attention to the extent of an abrupt and painful demise. On the other hand, you have something like Marvel Rivals, which launched in December to widespread acclaim and indisputable success, amassing over 20 million players in under two weeks. However, even its developers aren’t immune to the industry-wide plague of layoffs.
On LinkedIn, game director Thaddeus Sasser revealed that Marvel Rivals’ Seattle-based development team – which works alongside the game’s core dev team in China, led by creative director Guangyun Chen – has been laid off.
“This is such a weird industry,” Sasser wrote. “My stellar, talented team just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase Games… and were just laid off!”
Level designer Jack Burrows also confirmed the layoffs on his own LinkedIn profile. Burrows wrote, “Welp, just got laid off from my job working on Marvel Rivals with NetEase. 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.”
NetEase Games has made no official statement about the layoffs, but it’s fair to say the news comes as a huge surprise. Marvel Rivals has consistently enjoyed high player numbers since its December release, and following the launch of Season 1 last month, the hero shooter peaked at over 644,000 concurrent players on Steam.
