Marvel Rivals, the Overwatch 2-lunch-eating multiplayer shooter that boasted 20 million players within days of its December 2024 launch, has laid off an unspecified number of employees in its US operations, according to separate posts by recently laid off employees on LinkedIn.
“My stellar, talented team just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase Games… and were just laid off!” wrote Thaddeus Sasser, a game director at NetEase.
The Verge has reached out to NetEase for comment on the scope and reason for the layoffs.
One way players have reacted to the news by lodging complaints via user reviews on Steam, voicing their anger that NetEase would lay off the team responsible for a game so evidently popular. Out of the roughly 1,000 reviews posted today, more than 300 have been negative.
Along with Palworld and Helldivers 2, Marvel Rivals has proved one of the standouts in a series of live-service flops in the face of stiff competition from entrenched live-service games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. It’s in the top 5 games based on weekly active users across Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam and it’s currently sitting at number three on Steam’s most-played games chart. And yet, apparently, that wild success wasn’t enough to insulate its US team from layoffs.
Sasser vocalized the disconnect in his LinkedIn post, writing, “This is such a weird industry…”
