Image via NetEase Games
A couple of years ago, my wife and I put our entire life savings and every other penny we had into a new house close to our hometown. The house itself stank of wet dog, had horrible carpets, and a rotting garage. But my wife had the vision for a family home, so we worked towards it.
The carpets are gone, as is the wet dog smell, and a great deal of other awful things that took our own blood, sweat, and tears to remove. The garage is now a proper set of three rooms with a new bedroom on top, but we didn’t build it. We hired builders and architects to do that.
You see, from the word go, the entire project had obsolescence built in. We knew we couldn’t turn the garage into a set of functional rooms, and that it would instead take a team of builders, plumbers, electricians, and structural engineers who knew what they were doing. Once their job was done, we’d no longer needed them.
This is, of course, true of the entire construction industry. It’s why building companies are so successful, and the plumbers in my area seem to be able to pick and choose which jobs they take because they’ve got so much work on offer.
What’s the point of this ramble about my house? Well, NetEase seems to have done the same thing, except instead of a building company, it’s flippantly used people’s lives.
The Game Isn’t Dead, Long Live the Game?
You may well have caught more than a few US-based developers who worked on Marvel Rivals announcing their new adventures into unemployment over the past week. At first, I wasn’t sure I believed it. But publisher NetEase has now confirmed the situation in a statement to PCGamer.
I won’t regurgitate the entire statement here because you should check on PCGamer’s fantastic reporting for that. What I will say is that I find it careless at best to announce a “reduction of a design team based in Seattle” when you have, in fact, laid off every member of staff in the Seattle office. At least, that’s the case to my knowledge.
Steven Totilo later reported via Game File that NetEase is planning or has already closed several other studios it purchased in recent years. While they’re not specifically relevant to Marvel Rivals, I think it backs up the evidence suggesting the publisher is treating people like numbers and their lives like flies to be swatted out of existence rather well.
There are two schools of thought here. First, Marvel Rivals is the runaway success it is, but NetEase wants to cut costs as soon as possible to ensure longevity. Rather than refocus the Seattle team on far-future content, they’re being cut because there are more than enough staff elsewhere to keep the flow of content coming.
Second, NetEase built the teams it needed to make Marvel Rivals and give it the best chance of success possible, but that it always knew that if the game took off, it would remove the Seattle-based staff once things stabilized because they were only needed to get things off the ground.
I think that, much like my garage work, the reality is far more nuanced. I actually believe that despite the US allowing companies to cut ties with staff and leave them with nothing but mental anguish, NetEase is likely looking after them with redundancy payments. Marvel Rivals is raking in so much cash it would be hard to justify not doing so.
With the bleakest of outlooks, I think this situation was always in the minds of those at the top of NetEase. Those with the power, the spreadsheets, and shareholders breathing down their necks.
Regardless, it’s irresponsible to design a business model like this or even vaguely tolerate one. After all, indie developers work as hard as possible to avoid redundancies and layoffs, and often close or kill games as a unit, as a whole. For such a prominent publisher to do this is both embarrassing for it and the bleakest outlook for the games industry I’ve seen over the past 12 months.
Support Your Local Indies
Look, we love Marvel Rivals here at Bonus Action. It’s a game a bunch of us get together and play while Matt carries us and Cande explains to me over Slack how the game works while I endlessly wonder how good I could ever really be.
But in a world, as many are pointing out, where you can make a game like Concord and lose your job because it’s deemed a failure, or make a resoundingly brilliant and very much profitable game like Marvel Rivals and still lose your job, how do you keep your job?
Losing your income, especially when you’re supporting a family, is terrifying. It ruins your immediate and long-term future for a good long while, and your mental health takes a colossal toll. So I ask NetEase: How can you do that when you have a game making enough money to give you other options? How can you take stability away from so many because of numbers on a page and however many other arbitrary factors I’m sure were either boiled down to a pie chart or Google Sheet?
Yes, I’m being harsh, but I know it can be better. Indie games are now, more than ever, the future. Independent developers are paving the way for better working conditions and games made from passion that you can actually feel while you play. When was the last time a Bethesda game felt as good as something like Cinnabunny?
Don’t punish those still working on Marvel Rivals for this, support the game if you love it. That’s what we should all be doing. But if you see an indie game you think looks good amid a slew of mid-looking AAA games, maybe give it your attention. I bet you’ll have a better time with it.
About the Author
Discover more from Bonus Action
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
