Marvel Rivals Director laid off following the game’s highly successful launch

Marvel Rivals has been a huge hit since it launched back in December last year, with the free-to-play hero shooter amassing more than 20 million downloads in under two weeks and seeing a peak concurrent player count of almost 650,000 on Steam alone. Despite the game’s undeniable success, one of Marvel Rivals’ game directors has announced that he and others from his team have now been laid off.

Making the surprise announcement on LinkedIn, the Games director at Marvel Rivals' support studio Thaddeus Sasser wrote “This is such a weird industry…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? :D”

Alongside Sasser, Marvel Rivals level designer Jack Burrows confirmed this recent spree of firings, writing “Welp, just got laid off from my job working on Marvel Rivals with NetEase. Was an enormous pleasure to work with my American coworkers who join me in this sad culling. Just couldn't dodge that big boot I guess, no matter how big the success of the gig.”

Given the undeniable and rapid success of Marvel Rivals, this announcement comes as a huge surprise. Hopefully we learn more on exactly what went down sooner rather than later.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see how players respond to this latest move – and whether this marks the first major red stain on what was otherwise a highly-compelling and growing live-service shooter.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of this firing? Does this reflect badly on Marvel Rivals / NetEase? Where do you hope to see Sasser and co. move to in the wake of all this? Let us know down below.

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