‘Marvel Rivals’ layoffs are a telltale sign of the video game industry’s hypocrisy
The games industry has been hit with over 20,000 layoffs since 2023. It feels like new announcements of team reductions and studio closures roll out every week or so. With an industry in crisis, you would expect major success stories to stick out and be rewarded. Marvel Rivals, NetEase’s hero shooter, which was released in December 2024 and has made $2.9 billion this quarter alone, is one such runaway success story—an increasingly rare one in the video games industry.
This is why everyone was blindsided when NetEase laid off the game’s director and the entire U.S. team on February 18, 2025.
The news came out after director Thaddeus Sasser posted he was looking for a job on LinkedIn: “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!” Sasser wrote. Many of the game’s top-level designers followed suit with similar posts.
Just two days later, the game reached its highest current player count: 40 million players.
Saying that the video game industry is merely “weird” is quite generous on (ex-)director Thaddeus Sasser’s part. At this point, most of the large studios in the industry feel like they’re owned by people who think of their pocketbooks more than the long-term quality of their products—or their player base.
Proof of a broken industry
Since it has raked in nearly $3 billion in just a few months and attracted a player base big enough to have 40 million people playing simultaneously, Marvel Rivals seems to be the polar opposite of Concord. Yet the saga of Sony’s Concord comes to mind in light of these layoffs. Sony attempted to enter the overcrowded hero shooter realm with Concord and only achieved 697 concurrent players. The flop was so spectacular that Sony pulled Concord from stores entirely and refunded players. They shuttered the studio that made the game, laying off its entire staff.
While any studio closure is a major loss, the people who made the comparatively successful Marvel Rivals surely deserved a different fate. And yet, another point of comparison arises, like when Xbox Studios shuttered Tango Gameworks in May 2024, shortly after the studio delivered the highly success and critically adored game Hi-Fi Rush. It was later speculated that Xbox closed Tango to pay for its recent Activision-Blizzard acquisition, and Tango happened to be between productions.
Both stories paint a picture of an unhealthy industry, where a flop and a runaway hit offer an equal chance of losing your job.
Fans, fellow industry workers, and journalists turned to social media, expressing their confusion and anger over the Marvel Rivals layoffs. “Release game that does well. Get fired. Release game that still does well but below expectations. Get blamed for being woke and then fired. Healthy industry everyone,” Bluesky user Emmy summed up.
How is this “investing more” in a game’s future?
The laid-off Marvel Rivals team was based in Seattle. Since their parent studio, NetEase, is based in China, they might have simply wanted to consolidate their team into one location. Still, NetEase released a statement, and it feels very hollow.
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 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.
Phrases like “optimize development efficiency” are used to defend layoffs a lot these days. It’s an empty phrase that feels like shorthand for “cost-cutting.” Referring to the destruction of a whole team as an adjustment is rough.
Most importantly, decimating the team that made Marvel Rivals such a runaway hit is unlikely to improve the game. Inevitably, when a game decreases in quality, people stop playing it, which means less sales. Either the people running game studios don’t understand this or they don’t care. Perhaps to them, a game is merely a product to run through the juicer until it’s dry, and then toss the carcass.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
