ENTERTAINMENT

Marvel Rivals developer NetEase has confirmed cuts to its Seattle-based design team for “organizational reasons.”

Overnight, Marvel Rivals game director Thaddeus Sasser took to LinkedIn to announce that he and his team were laid off.

“This is such a weird industry,” Sasser began. “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! Times are tough all over – Let’s find these incredible people new jobs, because we all need to eat, right? :D”

The video game development community reacted with a mix of shock and anger to the cuts, given Marvel Rivals’ explosive success. The free-to-play hero shooter has seen over 20 million downloads since launch in December, and huge peak concurrent player numbers on Steam.

According to Sasser’s LinkedIn profile, his team focused on game and level design work for Marvel Rivals, “offering guidance, strategy, and design direction over the last couple of years.”

NetEase issued IGN a statement confirming the layoffs, but failed to specify how many people were cut.

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

“This resulted in a reduction of a design team based in Seattle that is part of a larger global design function in support of Marvel Rivals. We appreciate the hard work and dedication of those affected and will be treating them confidentially and respectfully with recognition for their individual contributions.”

But NetEase was keen to stress that the layoffs won’t impact ongoing support for Marvel Rivals, whose primary development team is based in China.

“We want to reassure our fanbase that the core development team for Marvel Rivals, which continues to be led by Lead Producer Weicong Wu and Game Creative Director Guangyun Chen in Guangzhou, China, remains fully committed to delivering an exceptional experience,” NetEase continued.

“We are investing more, not less, into the evolution and growth of this game. We’re excited to deliver new super hero characters, maps, features, and content to ensure an engaging live service experience for our worldwide player base.”

This is the latest round of layoffs at NetEase, which has pulled back from a number of overseas investments and closed studios in the U.S. and Japan, including Visions of Mana developer Ouka Studios. In November, Worlds Untold, headed by Mass Effect alumni Mac Walters, announced a pause of operations after a split with publisher NetEase. And in January it cut Jar of Sparks, founded by Halo and Destiny 2 veteran Jerry Hook in 2022.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Many of Disney’s attempts to spin television shows out of its marquee theatrical brands have been hampered by a refusal to think in TV terms – it’s hard to watch the indistinct, truncated episodes of something like Obi-Wan Kenobi or Hawkeye without thinking of the better movies that could’ve told these stories. In some ways, Pixar’s Win or Lose could be accused of a similar waffling between television and film. The animation studio’s first original TV series (that is, not a series of streaming shorts starring pre-established characters) follows a week leading up to a middle-school softball championship from multiple perspectives, both child and adult, each episode dedicated to a single character. As such, its episodes are distinct from one another, but also quite short – sometimes under 20 minutes when you subtract the protracted credits – and often lacking even temporary resolution. Presumably this is all building to an extended big-game finale, but with only five of eight episodes provided for advance review, it’s hard to say whether it will wind up feeling more like a clever use of its chosen medium, or simply a Rashomon-style feature film sliced neatly into pieces.

But what’s great about Win or Lose, setting it apart from other high-profile Disney+ shows, is that the episodes are too entertaining for this question to matter. After the intermittently inspired retread of Inside Out 2, here is a Pixar project more in tune with the original Inside Out, as well as 2022’s Turning Red: a show that’s attentive to the lives of tweenage kids and their various caregivers, and expresses its characters’ feelings with the stylized freedom of great animation.

Win or Lose’s episodes repeatedly start from firm emotional grounding before using animation to bring its characters’ conflicts to more whimsical life. The first episode introduces the Pickles, the co-ed softball team coached by Dan (Will Forte), and then turns to the struggles of Dan’s daughter Laurie (Rosie Foss), who is not naturally athletic but wants desperately to prove herself on the field as a way of asserting her worth. (Clearly her parents’ divorce and its attendant wounds remain fresh.) Her anxiety manifests as a cutely gross blob called Sweaty (Jo Firestone) who sits on her back, growing bigger and weightier with every moment of self-doubt – but doesn’t come to literal life in the reality of the show. Other characters can’t see Sweaty; as with other metaphors in the series – an suit of armor on a secretly sensitive teacher and umpire; a shapeshifting girlboss persona for a stressed-out overachiever – it’s a flight of fancy that’s not “real” but not precisely depicted as fantasy, either. The show simply doesn’t belabor its transitions between subjective and objective experience, and in doing so, Pixar finds a beautifully fluid approach to the old saw of seeing scenes repeatedly play out from multiple perspectives.

Some of these running metaphors can feel a little too orderly, like the attempts to chart, categorize, and bureaucratize the roiling emotions of the Inside Out movies. But as with those films, especially the first one, there’s also a teachable utility for the show’s all-ages audience. Without getting preachy – in fact, often while being hilarious – Win or Lose visualizes how both children and adults process their emotional challenges, and how those dimensions are often initially hidden from casual view. It’s especially sad, then, that one feeling – fear – prompted Disney to cut a storyline for the transgender character Kai (Chanel Stewart), a middle-schooler only glimpsed in the first five episodes (and now implicitly retconned into being a straight, cisgender character). The given rationale was that “many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline,” a watery truism that somehow wasn’t applied to the show’s treatment of similarly delicate real-life topics like divorce, economic struggle, social ostracism, or lost love. Were “many parents” eager for a family show with an entire episode about an adult man navigating dating apps?

In a perverse way, knowledge of the interference faced by Win or Lose makes the show itself all the more impressive; it could have easily wound up feeling as focus-grouped and over-engineered as any number of more muddled Disney projects. Instead, it hits that sweet spot where kids, especially those close to the ages of the characters, can lock into it, and adults can marvel at its cleverness and honesty. The show proves that Pixar is more than capable of continuing to innovate in family-friendly animation – when their parent company lets them.

Welcome to a hump day of high percentage discount opportunities. Cases in point include a hellishly good Hades price and a slam dunk on NBA 2K25. My antiquated self is also all about 80% off Oblivion GOTY and the rather timeless Batman Arkham Collection. Failing all those, go score a cheap FFXVI, GTA V, or some other acronym that will befuddle any non-gamers who have stumbled into this article by mistake…

This Day in Gaming 🎂

In retro news, I’m celebrating the 16th birthday of House of the Dead: Overkill which (at 189 f-bombs dropped) is one of the sweariest video games ever made. Hilariously, it was released first on the more family-friendly Nintendo Wii console and eventually morphed into a kick arse edutainment game that taught you typing… via profanity. Bravo, Sega.