The development workforce working on Marvel Rivals has been affected by layoffs according to Game Director Thaddeus Sasser.
Sasser, who led a studio based in Seattle working on the game, posted on Linkedin (via Wario64) mentioning that his team has been laid off.
According to the post, Sasser’s team spent a lot of its time on the project as “sort of an “R & D” branch, coming up with new level design mechanics, gameplay mechanics, and so on.”
“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!
Oh well! Times are tough all over – Let’s find these incredible people new jobs, because we all need to eat, right?”
Unfortunately, the gaming industry has been widely affected by layoffs over the past year and change, following a period of expansion during the COVID pandemic. Netease and its teams have not been immune, and apparently working on an extremely successful game like Marvel Rivals doesn’t guarantee safety.
It’s worth clarifying that the team in Seattle isn’t the entire development team working on Marvel Rivals, and likely the development workforce in China led by Creative Director Guangyun Chen remains active and working on the game, which is currently in the middle of its first season.
In order to know more about the layoff and how they’ll affect the development of the game, we reached out to Netease, and we’ll update this post if we hear anything relevant back.
Update: Netease provided a comment about the layoffs, promising that the company remains fully committed to the game.
“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 currently available for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. As a new take on the hero shooter genre, it has been extremely successful.
According to the tracking website SteamDB, the game achieves over 300,000 peak concurrent players every day on Steam alone, and while the numbers have naturally declined from the record achieved when Season 1 launched, they’re still remarkably solid.
