Marvel Rivals team rewarded for game’s success with layoffs
Season two of the undeniably popular Marvel Rivals is expected in April—without the team that made the game, we guess.
Image: Marvel Games
One thing that seems true about our current moment is that corporations do not like the people who make them money and would, apparently, like to replace them with a plagiarism machine that can’t even make pizza without glue. But we digress. Today’s dispatch from the seventh layer of late capitalist hell comes from Kotaku, which reports that the director and team behind NetEase’s popular Marvel Rivals video game have been laid off.
“This is such a weird industry…” wrote director Thaddeus Sasser 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! Oh well!”
He’s not the only one. Level Designer Jack Burrows also announced he was “open to work” on LinkedIn. “Welp, just got laid off from my job working on Marvel Rivals with NetEase,” Burrows wrote. “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.”
NetEase did not respond to The A.V. Club’s request for comment. However, it is surprising that there was a big boot for such a game. Kotaku notes that it’s unclear how many were affected by the layoffs, what teams were targeted, and why. Marvel Rivals is tremendously popular and regularly appears at or near the top of the list of the most active games on the world’s biggest platforms.