By all accounts, Marvel Rivals has been a resounding success. The free-to-play super hero shooter was met with 20 million players at launch with reports by Chinese site GameLook that it's generating boatloads of money, including an estimated $136 million in its first month.
So what's the reward for the developers who helped bring Marvel Rivals to market? Layoffs.
Thaddeus Sasser, one of the game directors working on Marvel Rivals at NetEase Games, announced on LinkedIn that he, along with others developers, have been laid off.
"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!"
In a separate post on LinkedIn, level designer Jack Burrows also announced that he had been laid off. "Was an enormous pleasure to work with my American coworkers who join me in this sad culling," Burrows said. "Just couldn't dodge that big boot I guess, no matter how big the success of the gig."
At this point, it's unclear how widespread the layoffs at NetEase are. The developer has not offered any official statement, although the company has been scaling back its U.S. operations in recent months.
It's been a rough couple of years for those working in the gaming industry. It feels like just about every major publisher and studio have undergone some sort of layoffs, though most of them have seemingly been connected to failed or unsuccessful game launches.
This is one of the rare instance in which a live service game has overachieved, and yet developers still can't keep their jobs. As a live-service game, the success of Marvel Rivals will depend on keeping players engaged, which means delivering new content at a steady rate on a consistent basis. It's unclear if these layoffs will have any impact on future content for Marvel Rivals.
Reports of these layoffs come at a time when the community should be celebrating the game's success and the upcoming launch of its mid-Season 1 update. NetEase just announced that The Thing and Human Tourch will be added to the game on February 21st along with along with updates to competitive mode, tournament plans, and more.
Marvel Rivals appears to be as popular now as it was at launch, with the game regularly hovering around 200,000 concurrent players on Steam. But again, as a free-to-play game, this doesn't necessarily mean that the game is doing well financially. Marvel Rivals depends ont he sale of cosmetic items to generate profit. If there are millions of players, but not many are purchasing cosmetics, well, layoffs are inevitable.