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.

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.

Following an extremely sudden cut to the Marvel Rivals development team, it appears NetEase is going through even larger internal discussions about releasing an

Marvel Rivals is a big hit, but there was a time when its very existence was in doubt. That's according to a new Bloomberg report on developer NetEase and its CEO William Ding, which says that before the game was released there were discussions about cancelling it outright. NetEase has denied the claim.

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.

A Seattle-based team that contributed to development on the popular online action game Marvel Rivals has reportedly been dismissed

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.

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.