Marvel Rivals Game Director Thaddeus Sasser recently revealed that developer NetEase laid off his entire team.
In a post to LinkedIn, Sasser shared, “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!”
From there, he lauded one member of his team, Garry McGee, a level designer who was laid off.
It is unclear if Sasser was laid off.
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Based on Sasser’s LinkedIn profile, his team in the Seattle area “specialized in game and level design” for Marvel Rivals.
He notes that he specifically offered “guidance, strategy, and design direction” for the game “over the last couple of years.”
This is also mentioned in the above post where he shared, “A lot of our time on the project was spent as sort of an ‘R & D’ branch, coming up with new level design mechanics, gameplay mechanics, and so on.”
Jack Burrows, another Level Designer on Marvel Rivals, indicated he was laid off as well.
He wrote on LinkedIn, “Hey folks! Welp, just got laid off from my job working on Marvel Rivals with NetEase. 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.”
It is unclear why these layoffs occurred at this time or how many individuals have been affected.
Marvel Rivals launched at the beginning of December and quickly hit a peak concurrent player count of 480,099. The player counts stayed steady throughout the month and went even higher after the release of the game’s first season hitting an all-time peak of 644,269.
Since then it has fallen off a little bit, but still had a strong 308,674 peak concurrent player count in the last 24 hours.
On top of the strong player counts, Chinese website GameLook estimated that the game had grossed an estimated ¥400 million or about $54.5 million on Steam in just its first month.
Next, it claimed it grossed ¥200 million from PlayStation. That’s about $27.2 million.
From there, it estimated that the game brought in ¥20 million on Xbox. That’s around $2.7 million.
It then detailed that additional revenue came in from a non-Steam PC client likely totaling $15.6 million. That brings the overall non-China monthly gross to $100 million.
As for total revenue, the outlet shared it was likely around ¥1 billion or around $136.3 million meaning that it grossed another $36 million just in China.
What do you make of these layoffs?
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It's almost like the CCP don't care about workers. Imagine that.
RUG PULL INCOMING!!!!!!
THIS is why I never gave the Game a chance. Since Marvel(and by extention Disney) is involved, that means it WILL go Woke at some point.
They waited until the Game was successful, and now will likely hire Woke retărds to run the Game.
If this does happen, it's over for Marvel Rivals.
Also in case anyone doesn't know, Overwatch 2 is bring back Loot Boxes due to how bad the Game is right now. So I wouldn't put it past Blizzard to start coming out with Attractive Characters to get people back, while Marvel Rivals digs their own Grave.