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.
NetEase provided Polygon with this statement on the layoffs:
“We recently made the difficult decision to adjust Marvel Rivals’ development team structure for organizational reasons and to optimize development efficiency for the game. This resulted in a reduction of a design team based in Seattle that is part of a larger global design function in support of Marvel Rivals. We appreciate the hard work and dedication of those affected and will be treating them confidentially and respectfully with recognition for their individual contributions.
We want to reassure our fanbase that the core development team for Marvel Rivals, which continues to be led by Lead Producer Weicong Wu and Game Creative Director Guangyun Chen in Guangzhou, China, remains fully committed to delivering an exceptional experience. We are investing more, not less, into the evolution and growth of this game. We’re excited to deliver new super hero characters, maps, features, and content to ensure an engaging live service experience for our worldwide player base.”
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.
Update (Feb. 19): This post has been updated with a statement from NetEase.