I don’t write frequently enough to effectively cover recent events, but I thought the Netease layoffs story deserved a quick write-up.
If you are out of the loop – eyebrows were raised in the player community (as well as the game-dev community) this week when Marvel Rivals game director Thaddeus Sasser announced on linkedin that he and his Seattle team had been laid off. Netease later issued a statement to reassure players that they are not cutting back from investment in the title, but rather, this was a “difficult decision” “to optimize development efficiency”. Also as important context (read this analysis by Niko Partners), this is part of a broader cut in overseas studios at Netease since 2024.
My sympathies to these fellow game-devs who suffered this misfortune. I did also want to add a few thoughts, from the lens of “the realities of working for a multi-national company” and “the realities of working in co-dev projects”.
First, at the macro level, this is another example of the inherent risks when you work in a remote office far from the headquarters and home market of the company. This is not specific to the games industry, nor Netease as a Chinese company. You are far from the power center, and there’s a fog of war that affects your assessment of the company’s state. For example – there were some dramatic events happening at Netease last year, such as this corruption scandal(link in Chinese) that involved top gaming executives and 27 vendors (which have since been blacklisted). How has that impacted the overall vibe of Netease management and their decision-making? I’m not arguing that you should never work in the remote office of any company – actually over half of my game-dev career I’ve been in this mode – but you need to be clear-eyed about the structural risks.
Second, it’s worth considering the stage Chinese companies are at in the journey to becoming truly multi-national corporations – as a baseline I would expect them to be less mature still in managing their talent outside of China. Part of this are the multi-cultural challenges and how to effectively empower local workforces. Japanese game companies have been practicing this since the 80s; Korean firms since perhaps the late 90s; for the Chinese, since the late 2000s. (And really the inflection point is the mobile platform leapfrogging in the 2010s, from which Chinese devs rapidly accumulated immense wealth and capital.) In the Marvel Rivals layoffs, it feels like Netease was a bit surprised at the public reaction, and part of their messaging sounded like a rebrand – Seattle was a “support studio”, the “core team” and leadership are in Guangzhou. Previously they probably had little reason to go into such org details with players; indeed, the Wikipedia page was only updated on Feb 19 to reflect this insight.
Third, zooming in on the realities of remote co-development, and especially US-China game co-devs. I’ve a few years of personal experience in this regard. When the Chinese team is in practical terms the “lead studio” (putting in the bulk of the production capacity / most of the headcount, even if on paper they don’t have full decision-making authority e.g. the IP-holders’ approval rights), they typically have little patience for a remote team (whether its another team in the same company as is the case of Netease Seattle, or the IP owner’s co-dev team) to get into the “core” production pipeline. They probably have heavy-handed rules around version-control access and code/asset check-ins; the default mindset is to not give any to the remote teams, if politically possible. This “hostility” is simply because project management is usually chaotic enough already inside the “lead studio”, and they really do not want (nor have lots of proven experience) working across time-zones/languages/cultures with remote teams. So for the remote teams, it’s an uphill battle to really exert influence on the project. Indeed, I think the above linkedin post from the Seattle director alludes to this, when he mentions that the Seattle team is “sort of an ‘R & D’ branch, coming up with new level design mechanics, gameplay mechanics, and so on”. Speculating here – these mechanics possibly needed to be “sold” to the designers in the core Marvel Rivals team in Guangzhou, and then “properly implemented” by the engineering team there.
Another factor is where the remote team is on the org chart in relation to the “lead studio” – if it’s not reporting into the “lead studio”, but part of another function and embedded into the project, that creates more room for “arms-length” interactions. In my own past experience I’ve often been frustrated for having to consider such organizational intricacies, but alas, we are predictable creatures, and these are predictable structural issues.