Marvel Rivals dev team shocked with layoffs despite shooter's million-dollar success

UPDATE:Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad, who tracks the Chinese games market, explained that the Marvel Rivals situation is a result of a re-evaluation of NetEase's core business.

NetEase, who makes billions of dollars from live service games every year, has laid off the developers of the popular new shooter Marvel Rivals.

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From all accounts, the new Overwatch contender Marvel Rivals is a mega hit. The game has seen high playercounts on all platforms (10 million players in 72 hours), routinely hitting among the top-earning games on various storefronts. Rivals was so successful that it reportedly made over $130 million in its first month of availability. To put that into perspective, the entire Grand Theft Auto franchise made $175 million in 3 months.

These impressive milestones haven't stopped the onslaught of the games industry's ruthless layoffs. Today it was revealed that the dev team behind Marvel Rivals was laid off.

"My stellar, talented team just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase Games...and were just laid off!" Marvel Rivals game director Thaddeus Sasser said on LinkedIn.

Jack Burrows, who had served as level designer on Rivals, was also affected by the layoffs:

"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."

It's unknown how this will affect Marvel Rivals' future content pipeline. NetEase has not made a statement on the layoffs.

Marvel Rivals hit an all-time peak of over 644,000 players on Steam last month and currently has over 229,000 players at the time of writing.