NetEase was apparently very close to cancelling their current global success, Marvel Rivals.
As crazy as that sounds, these are findings shared by Bloomberg in their recent report. The company allegedly started to restructure their business over the last year, ending support or development for games around the world, including China. This is part of a broader attempt to bring the company back to profitability after a few harsh recent quarters.
This direction comes from the company’s CEO William Ding, who is alleged to be constantly changing his mind and is seen as volatile by Bloomberg’s sources.
Ding allegedly did not want to pay for the expensive licenses for Marvel’s most popular characters, such as Wolverine and Spider-Man. In fact, Ding went so far as to tell the artists to make their own original hero designs to replace these characters.
Of course, we saw none of those original NetEase characters actually make it into the game. Even Luna Snow, who is a deep cut even for loyal Marvelites, originally appeared in a different video game, 2018’s Marvel Future Fight, and has been in the actual comics since 2019.
Bloomberg’s sources claim that Ding’s attempt to replace Marvel’s heroes cost millions of dollars, which certainly implies that they got past the conceptual phase and could have been close to getting added in.
NetEase officially denied this claim, saying that Marvel has had a close partnership with them since 2017. Of course, it’s hard to take this response at face value when the company didn’t announce that they closed the Seattle studio that helped make Marvel Rivals. They belatedly confirmed the closure after word spread, and attempted to reassure players that development of the game would not be affected.
While we don’t know if the accounts of Bloomberg’s sources are accurate, it does paint a credible picture of the situation behind the scenes. If Ding is currently in a frame of mind where he seemingly makes decisions on a whim, he may have decided to close the Seattle studio on a whim.
Surely, the managers on the Marvel Rivals project would have anticipated the bad press and potential backlash this decision could have made. They didn’t seem to even have an opportunity to break the news on their own terms.
And with that frame of mind, it’s now hard to believe what NetEase would say about Marvel Rivals, or their other projects, at their word.
Niko Partners analyst Zeng Xiaofeng estimates that Marvel Rivals made $ 200 million in revenue in December alone, but we don’t know how much it cost NetEase to license these characters. We do know that NetEase reported gross profit loss of 2.5 % in the same quarter the game came out, so it may not be making as much money for the company as we all thought it did.
If NetEase doesn’t see the profits to match their investment, will they have more layoffs? Will they start making changes to it in an attempt to make more money, the same trap that has befallen Overwatch 2 or Destiny 2? It’s certainly strange to already be talking about Marvel Rivals like this, but this may already be the free-to-play shooter’s looming future.
