Marvel Rivals is this year’s current free-to-play PC game success story, attracting many millions of players over its opening weekend and making regular appearances in the Steam Most Played top 10 ever since. It garnered an estimated $136 million in January. So naturally, it’s time to start laying people off.
Last night, one of the project’s game directors, Thaddeus Sasser, revealed that an undisclosed number of US-based NetEase Games employees had been dismissed, including level designers Gary McGee and Jack Burrows. NetEase have now confirmed the news, calling it a move to “optimize development efficiency” and assuring players that they “are investing more, not less, into the evolution and growth of this game”. Just not so much the people working on it.
“This is such a weird industry…” Sasser wrote in a LinkedIn post last night. “My stellar, talented team just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase Games…and were just laid off! Oh well! Times are tough all over – Let’s find these incredible people new jobs, because we all need to eat, right?”
In that post, Sasser named McGee as one of the departing team members. Burrows has announced the loss of his job separately. “Was an enormous pleasure to work my American coworkers who join me in this sad culling,” he wrote. “Just couldn’t dodge that big boot, I guess, no matter how big the success of the gig.”
The cutbacks appear to be part of worldwide cost-cutting at NetEase, who are headquartered in China. Last November, they pulled funding for Worlds Untold, the studio co-founded by former Mass Effect developer Mac Walters. Last month, they also broke up with Jar Of Sparks, the studio co-founded by former Halo Infinite head of design Jerry Hook. And just this week, we learned of layoffs at Liquid Swords, founded by former Just Cause creative director Christofer Sundberg.
Some more context: the average cost of living and, by extension, the average salary in the USA and Sweden are dramatically higher than in China. I guess if I were a Chinese publisher looking to make a few spreadsheet cells turn green, I would start by making reductions overseas. Still, going after Marvel Rivals seems absolutely perverse.
The obvious difference between the previous NetEase-backed studio funding cuts and the Rivals situation is that the former had yet to release a game, while Rivals appears to be a colossal bread-winner. It’s the only recent release in the Steam most played top 10 at the time of writing, sharing a screen with eternal fixtures such as DOTA 2 and GTA 5. If a live service project can do this well and still undergo pruning, we might ask, what hope is there for anybody else?
In their statement confirming the layoffs (passed on by Stephen Totillo of Game File), NetEase say they have “made the difficult decision to adjust Marvel Rivals’ development team structure for organization reasons and to optimize development efficiency for the game”. Without sharing exact numbers, they comment that the ‘adjustments’ apply to “a design team based in Seattle that is part of a larger global design function in support of Marvel Rivals”. They will be treating those affected “confidentially and respectfully”.
The statement then switches the focus to Marvel Rivals itself, while quietly reminding readers that Rivals development is based primarily in China – an interesting show of a publisher managing perceptions of a game that is based on comicbooks and movies from the States, and thus easily read as an American cultural project.
“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 Guangyn Chen in Guangzhou, China, remains fully committed to delivering an exceptional experience,” it continues. “We are investing more, not less, into the evolution and growth of this game. We’re excited to deliver new super hero characters, maps, features, and content to ensure an engaging live service experience for our worldwide player base.”
The games industry continues to weather a phase of mass reductions, which have been variously attributed to rising interest rates, disappointing returns on new ‘n’ crappy technologies such as NFTs, and above all, a ‘market reset’ following over-ambitious expansion during the boom period created by Covid pandemic lockdowns.
Just yesterday, Sony’s out-going indie gaming boss Shuhei Yoshida summarised it all as an “overreaction” to Covid. “Companies invested too much, including ourselves,” he told VentureBeat. “Then we had to face reality and make adjustments.” Ah, that word ‘adjustment’ again. It’s possible NetEase’s desire for efficiency also has something to do with newly precarious trade relations between the US Trump administration and China, which saw world’s biggest publisher Tencent being added to a list of Chinese military companies.
The Covid reset argument and other explanations risk being used as distractions from the banal reality that video game publishers are always going to want to cut costs and increase profits, even when times are good. Thankfully, Marvel Rivals is here to clear things up.