Marvel Rivals Devs Got Snapped—Seattle Team Wiped Out, NetEase Says ‘Don’t Worry’

Published on February 21, 2025

Oh my God. Y’all ever wake up to straight-up nonsense? Because this is nonsense. Marvel Rivals just crushed it with 20 million downloads since launch—like, insanely successful—so what does NetEase do? Fires the entire Seattle design team.

HELLO?

Congrats on Your Success, Now Get Out

Thaddeus Sasser, the game director, hops on LinkedIn like:

“My stellar, talented team just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise in Marvel Rivals for NetEase Games… and were just laid off!”

WHAT?? No, because how do you fumble a W this hard? Your game is booming, people are hyped, the numbers are there, and your move is to cut the people who helped build it?

And it wasn’t even like, one or two people. Nah. Whole damn team. Just gone. Vanished. Thanos snapped out of existence.

NetEase: “Relax, Bro, The Game’s Fine”

So obviously, everyone’s pissed. People in the industry are fuming. Twitter is in shambles. And NetEase comes out with the classic corporate PR:

“We recently made the difficult decision to adjust Marvel Rivals’ development team structure for organizational reasons and to optimize development efficiency.”

Translation: We wanted to save money.

Then they go, “Don’t worry, guys! The core team is still in China. We’re actually investing MORE into the game.” Like, sir. Sir. You just fired an entire team. Do you hear yourself right now?

Marvel Rivals Ain’t Dead… Yet.

NetEase is swearing up and down that Marvel Rivals is going strong. They’re dropping new superheroes, maps, content, live-service updates—all that jazz. But let’s be real, this is not a good look. This is just the latest in NetEase’s “whoops, we killed another studio” speedrun.

• Visions of Mana devs? Gone.
• Worlds Untold? Dead.
• Jar of Sparks? Snuffed out before it even got started.

So yeah, the game’s alive… for now. But we’ve seen this story before, and it never ends well.

Moral of the Story? Game Dev is Pain.

Marvel Rivals is thriving, but its own devs just got ejected into space, and NetEase is over here saying, “Trust me, bro, everything’s fine.”