Marvel Rivals US Team Laid Off Despite Hero Shooter's Explosive Popularity - UPDATE

[Update 10:00am PT 2/19/2025] - A NetEase rep responded to our request for comment late last night with the following statement, stressing to fans that this doesn't mean less focus on Rivals, but in fact the team is investing more into the title.

"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 appreciate the hard work and dedication of those affected and will be treating them confidentially and respectfully with recognition for their individual contributions.

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. 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."

Original Story Follows:

It seems success doesn't guarantee anything in the games industry, as NetEase has reportedly laid off the entire US dev team for its wildly popular hero shooter, Marvel Rivals. 

The news comes via game director Thaddeus Sasser on LinkedIn (via ResetEra), with Sasser confirming that the team was just laid off a few hours ago. 

"This is such a weird industry," Sasser began in his post. He continued, "My stellar, talented team just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase...and were just laid off!" Level designed Jack Burrows also posted the news that he had been laid off on LinkedIn (via ResetEra). Based on the wording of Sasser's post, though, it seems the entire US team working on Rivals was laid off today.

This announcement is juxtaposed against the news that Marvel Rivals' 1.5 Season update, which wil include the Human Torch and The Thing as playable heroes, will launch next week. Additionally, a new Dev Vision video was released this morning, talking about the upcoming Season 1.5 update and what players should expect this month. The timing of the layoffs and the news dropping could be entirely coincidental, however. 

While we don't have hard confirmation on the full scope of the layoffs, or even why they took place considering how wildly popular Marvel Rivals has been since its launch last December, industry analyst Mat Piscatella points out that Rivals still consistently sits in the "top 5 games in US Weekly active users" across both consoles and PC, according to data provided by Circana.  Meanwhile, SteamDB shows Marvel Rivals as the platform's third most played game right now, with over 224K concurrent players at the time of this writing.

The games industry has continuted to hemorrhage talent as more and more workers have been laid off over the last few years. Just this year we've seen layoffs at Ubisoft, and earlier this month 66 employees were let go at Iron Galaxy. 

We've reached out to NetEase for comment on the scope of the layoffs, timing, and why they occurred and will update this post should they provide one.