According to a report from Bloomberg, the cuts to the North American team working on Marvel Rivals aren’t an anomaly. NetEase founder and CEO William Ding is reported to have cut hundreds of jobs, closed studios, and taken a firmer hand with the company’s Japanese teams — including the one led by former Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio head Toshihiro Nagoshi.

The problem, according to a source cited by the report, was that Ding didn't like paying Disney, which owns Marvel, for the right to use its characters in the game. At one point,

Amidst the abrupt layoffs of some employees who worked Marvel Rivals, it's now reported that the game's cancelation was considered prior to its release, which is a surprising revelation, given it has already surpassed 40 million players.

Marvel Rivals, a game which has already become a multiplayer juggernaut, almost didn’t happen at all, a new report claims. Struggles over character rights and a costly move to repurpose the game nearly allegedly caused publisher NetEase to scrap the project altogether.

Marvel Rivals was nearly canceled by NetEase's founder before its release, a source reportedly close to the game's publisher claims.

Marvel Rivals is about to get its next major update on Feb. 21 but, just three days before that content goes live, NetEase has laid off an entire team working o

NetEase declined to detail the exact scope of the Seattle layoffs which come just two months after Marvel Rivals launched to rapid critical and financial success with reports estimating that it raised over $130 million in revenue in its first month.

Marvel Rivals has been a huge hit for NetEase. The Chinese publisher recently reported the free-to-play hero shooter had over 40 million players. But the Overwatch clone was almost canceled over the licensing fees the company would owe to Disney for using its popular comic book characters.

During the whole fiscal year 2024, NetEase Games brought in $11.5 billion, another slight plus compared to the previous year. The revenues from mobile games made up around 73% of the total, down around 1.5% from the fiscal year 2023. NetEase attributed this to both Marvel Rivals and its long-running wuxia battle royale game Naraka: Bladepoint.

NetEase's Marvel Rivals can't be described as anything less than a hit, netting ten million players in just three days from launch and raking in millions for developer NetEase in the weeks since. But a new report suggests that NetEase CEO and founder William Ding nearly canceled the game due to a reluctance to use licensed IP.