A Seattle-based team that contributed to development on the popular online action game Marvel Rivals has reportedly been dismissed by its parent company.
Game director Thaddeus Sasser announced via LinkedIn on Tuesday that his team had been eliminated.
“This is such a weird industry,” Sasser wrote. “My stellar, talented team just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase Games… and were just laid off!”
Sasser is a veteran level designer and creative director that previously worked at Treyarch, Electronic Arts, Deep Silver, and Striking Distance. His past credits include Battlefield: Hardline, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, and Agents of Mayhem.
According to NetEase, a total of six U.S. employees were dismissed, including level designer Garry McGee. Notably, this was not the entirety of the Rivals development team, the core of which is headquartered in Guangzhou, China.
“We recently made the difficult decision to adjust Marvel Rivals’ development team structure for organizational reasons and to optimize development efficiency for the game,” a NetEase spokesperson said in a statement to GeekWire. “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.”
Marvel Rivals debuted Dec. 5 as a free-to-play action game for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. Players take the role of various characters from the Marvel Universe, including Iron Man, Wolverine, Captain America, and Spider-Man, and fight one another in short, intense 5v5 team battles.
While it obviously has a lot going for it on sheer brand recognition, Rivals still qualifies as an unexpected success story. As both a game-as-a-service and a “hero shooter,” it faced heavy competition at launch from several of the most popular games on the modern market, including Overwatch 2 and Apex Legends.
Despite that, it’s managed to carve out an audience. Independent trackers such as Circana’s Mat Piscatella have noted that Rivals is currently in the top 10 most-played games on PlayStation, Steam, and Xbox.
NetEase has a separate studio co-headquartered in Seattle called Anchor Point Studios.
Story updated with comment from NetEase.
