Not even Marvel Rivals is safe from layoffs as game director’s dev team is reportedly let go

There hasn’t been a much bigger hit in video games in recent months than Marvel Rivals, but not even some of the team behind the successful hero shooter is safe from layoffs, apparently.

NetEase Games game director Thaddeus Sasser, the head of a team that has been working on Marvel Rivals, announced on his LinkedIn page today that his team has been let go from the studio despite the game’s massive success in its first two months since launch.

“This is such a weird industry,” Sasser said 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!”

According to Sasser’s page, they have been working at NetEase Games on Marvel Rivals since January 2023. On the post about the layoffs, he describes a lot of his and another co-worker’s time “as sort of an ‘R&D’ branch, coming up with new level design mechanics, gameplay mechanics, and so on.”

Sasser did not specify if he was included in the layoffs, but quickly switched gears to finding affected employees work in the future, such as level designer Garry McGee who helped support the game that’s garnered lots of revenue and tens of millions of players since its full release in early December 2024.

Sasser says his team at NetEase “specialized in game and level design in the Seattle area to work on Marvel Rivals” while “offering guidance, strategy, and design direction over the last couple of years and it’s been quite an exciting adventure.”

Rivals is published and developed by NetEase Games, which is based mostly out of China. It’s unknown how many dev teams like Sasser’s exist elsewhere, but one thing is for sure: several talented designers are now looking for work to begin 2025.

Dot Esports has reached out to Sasser for comment and clarification on this story.

Update on Feb. 18 at 4:35pm CT: Industry analyst Daniel Ahmad confirms that the layoffs only affected the team in Seattle, and the core development crew in China has been unscathed.

“Worth noting this round of layoffs only impacts the team in the US, not the core dev team in China,” Ahmad said on Twitter/X. “It’s part of a broader reconsideration of NetEase’s overseas investments and studios. The firm has pulled funding from a number of overseas teams over the past year.

Update on Feb. 18 at 3:29pm CT: According to Second Wind’s Nick Calandra, “six total people” were let go “which sounds like the whole North American division for the game.”