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 doesn’t appear to have been enough for the company, which has now seemingly laid off Marvel Rivals’ US development team.
Marvel Rivals game director Thaddeus Sasser broke the news of layoffs at NetEase’s Texas-based studio in a post 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.”
McGee shared a similar sentiment, writing, “My team recently helped develop and launch Marvel Rivals, which turned out to be a bigger hit than any of us expected! Unfortunately my team was also laid off. Strange times all across the industry indeed.”
As unexpected as NetEase’s decision might seem in context of Marvel Rivals’ breakout success, the move follows layoffs across a number of its western studios. In November, for instance, BioWare veteran Mac Walters announced a “pause” in operations at his NetEase-backed Worlds Untold. Similarly, Jar of Sparks – a first-party NetEase developer founded by Halo Infinite head of design Jerry Hook in 2022 – halted work on its currently-unannounced debut title in January, laying off staff and began searching for a new publishing partner.
This week also saw an unspecified number of layoffs at Swedish developer Liquid Swords, which was formed in 2020 by Avanlanche Studios’ Christofer Sundberg with NetEase funding.
Today’s layoffs continue a devastating few years for the games industry, which has seen over 25,000 employees lose their jobs since the start of 2023. Less than two months into 2025, another 900 layoffs have already been recorded, affecting workers across the likes of Unity, HiRez Studios, Sumo Digital, Ubisoft, Splash Damage, and Midnight Society.
