Marvel Rivals, the Overwatch 2-lunch-eating multiplayer shooter that boasted 20 million players inside days of its December 2024 launch, has laid off an unspecified variety of staff in its US operations, in accordance with separate posts by lately laid off staff on LinkedIn.
“My stellar, proficient crew simply helped ship an extremely profitable new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase Video games… and had been simply laid off!” wrote Thaddeus Sasser, a sport director at NetEase.
The Verge has reached out to NetEase for touch upon the scope and cause for the layoffs.
A method gamers have reacted to the information by lodging complaints through consumer opinions on Steam, voicing their anger that NetEase would lay off the crew liable for a sport so evidently fashionable. Out of the roughly 1,000 opinions posted at present, greater than 300 have been damaging.
Together with Palworld and Helldivers 2, Marvel Rivals has proved one of many standouts in a series of live-service flops within the face of stiff competitors from entrenched live-service video games like Name of Obligation and Fortnite. It’s within the top 5 games based mostly on weekly energetic customers throughout Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam and it’s presently sitting at quantity three on Steam’s most-played games chart. And but, apparently, that wild success wasn’t sufficient to insulate its US crew from layoffs.
Sasser vocalized the disconnect in his LinkedIn publish, writing, “That is such a bizarre business…”