Marvel Rivals is one of the most successful games of the past months. It is therefore surprising that the executives at NetEase are now conducting extensive layoffs.
What is known about the layoffs? Triggered by a post from developer Thaddeus Sasser on linkedin.com, the news circulated that there have been layoffs in the Marvel Rivals team. With obvious frustration, Sasser writes:
“This is such a crazy industry… My amazing, talented team just helped develop an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase Games… and just got laid off!”
In an interview with pcgamer.com, officials from the Chinese mega-corporation NetEase later officially confirmed the reports of the layoffs. The statement reads:
We recently made the difficult decision to adjust the structure of the Marvel Rivals development team for organizational reasons and to optimize the development efficiency for the game. This led to a reduction of the design team in Seattle […]. We appreciate the hard work and commitment of those affected and will treat them confidentially and respectfully, acknowledging their individual contributions.
The first season of Marvel Rivals in the trailer:
Layoffs despite success
What’s the status of Marvel Rivals? Marvel Rivals is a team-based superhero PvP shooter from NetEase Games that made a huge impact when it launched on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series in December 2024. At peak times, there were 644,269 players simultaneously on the servers just on Steam (via steamdb.info). Additional players joined from other platforms. This was in January 2025.
Even now, the multiplayer shooter continues to be played daily by hundreds of thousands (Daily Peak on Steam is at 318,993 – via steamdb.info). Reviews on Steam are “Very Positive” (80 percent of the 216,841 reviews are positive).
As anyone interested can download and play Marvel Rivals for free, no conclusions can be drawn about the revenue from all this information. However, there are reports that Marvel Rivals is said to have generated more than 130 million US dollars in revenue alone in the first month (via 80.lv). Moreover, those affected, like Sasser, also speak of financial success.
So why the layoffs? The simple answer is likely: In order to provide a released service game with new content over the coming months and years, you no longer need the entire team.
If the decision-makers then have no follow-up project for the developers no longer needed, layoffs within the gaming industry are unfortunately a commonly used method to save costs and thus maximize profits. Famous studios like BioWare are not protected from this either – right, EA?!
