Successful Marvel Rivals was almost canceled — what is happening at NetEase

We have already reported that NetEase fired the developers of Marvel Rivals despite the game’s success. It turns out that CEO William Ding wanted to cancel it altogether.

Unlike Concord, the most high-profile failure last year, and a lesser-known of the Ukrainian project Level Zero: Extraction, Marvel Rivals became a hit, earned millions and has gathered hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players in just a few days. But all of this could have been avoided because of Ding’s reluctance to use a third party licensed brand.

Bloomberg describes the current situation at NetEase: the company’s chairman is actively cutting jobs, closing studios, and divesting from investments abroad. According to the report, the goal is a smaller and denser product portfolio to prevent the recent slowdown in growth and compete with Tencent and MiHoYo. According to the sources, Ding did not want to pay for the use of licensed Marvel characters and tried to convince the game’s creators to use original designs instead. The attempted cancellation allegedly cost NetEase millions, but the game was released anyway.

In addition to firing the Marvel Rivals Seattle team, over the past year, Ding has stopped investing in the company’s overseas projects — Japanese and Western studios such as Bungie, Devolver Digital, and Blizzard Entertainment. According to the report, Ding believes that games that will not generate hundreds of millions a year are not worth the company’s time. However, a company spokesperson told Bloomberg that NetEase does not set «arbitrary total numbers to determine the viability of a new game».

NetEase employees told Bloomberg about the company’s internal problems, allegedly caused by Ding’s instability as a leader. He tends to make quick decisions and change his mind frequently, forces staff to work late, recently hired several university graduates for senior management positions, and allegedly closed so many projects that NetEase may not release any games in China next year.

NetEase’s disinvestment in games comes at a time of continued uncertainty in the gaming industry, mostly in the West. For several years in a row, the gaming industry has seen massive layoffs, game cancellations, studio closures, and Failure of expensive projects.