‘This is such a weird industry’: Marvel Rivals lays off NA-based team amid explosive success

Marvel Rivals is easily one of the most popular games this year, drawing hundreds of thousands of players on Steam alone. And yet it’s developer NetEase has laid off a team who worked on the game out of its Seattle-based studio.

Game director Thaddeus Sasser wrote a post on LinkedIn about the layoffs, which specifically mention level designer Garry McGee as one of the affected developers, and level designer Jack Burrows corroborated the news with his own post.

“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!”

According to Sasser, the team focused on “coming up with new level design mechanics, gameplay mechanics, and so on,” for the superhero shooter.

Polygon has asked NetEase for comment on the layoffs and will update this post when we hear back.

Marvel Rivals is one of the top five games with the most active users across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Steam, according to Circana data from industry analyst Mat Piscatella. It’s also held one of the top five spots for the most played games on Steam, regularly hovering around 200,000 concurrent players. Later this week, it will enter the second half of its first season and introduce two new heroes to the roster with the Thing and Human Torch.