Despite the meteoric success of Marvel Rivals this year, the development team from NetEase behind the hit title has now been hit with layoffs. More specifically, the Seattle team, led by one of the game directors of Marvel Rivals, Thaddeus Sasser, has seemingly been let go, alongside other members of the team, which, as far as we’ve seen, have been level designers. No official comment from NetEase or Marvel has been made as of yet. Unfortunately, the news comes just after the team showcased their next big patch, which pertained to currency changes and conversion within Marvel Rivals.
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In a LinkedIn post, one of Marvel Rivals‘ game directors, Thaddeus Sasser, commented on the situation.
“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!” Sasser said. “Oh well! Times are tough all over – Let’s find these incredible people new jobs, because we all need to eat, right?”
The news of the layoff does come as a complete surprise, given the rapid success of Marvel Rivals since its launch this past December. The PvP superhero shooter hit big with gamers at first, letting them play as their favorite heroes like Spider-Man, Hawkeye, and the popular Jeff the Land Shark. Just last month in January, the game released its first season, which added the highly-anticipated Fantastic Four, which includes Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and The Thing, as playable characters.
Unfortunately, the trend of layoffs in the video game industry are not uncommon, especially now. Just recently, 10:10 Games, the team behind Funko Fusion, had mass layoffs due to the failure of their first title. Then, in January, over 1,900 employees from Microsoft were laid off, likely due to the acquisition of Activision. It’s unknown how big the layoff of the Seattle team will be on the ongoing development of Marvel Rivals, but it’s unfortunate that those who helped bring the project to life won’t be able to be part of it anymore.
As mentioned before, no comment has been made from either NetEase or Marvel about the layoffs.
