According to Bloomberg, William Ding, the founder and CEO of NetEase, has been cutting costs in his company to compete with other billion-dollar companies Tencent and Mihoyo. People within the company are saying these kinds of decisions led to conversations of Marvel Rivals almost being canceled or heavily changed before it was released and likely played a big part in the recent Marvel Rivals layoffs earlier this week.
Why was Marvel Rivals almost canceled?
Marvel Rivals has been an unquestionable success since its release in December. Since then, it has made more than $200 million in revenue with more than 40 million registered players. However, Bloomberg explains that Ding wanted to cut costs, so to avoid paying Walt Disney for Marvel characters, the game was almost canceled entirely. There was also a timeframe where Ding told the team to design unique characters to replace the iconic heroes. If this had gone through, it wouldn’t have been branded as a Marvel game, but NetEase would save money by having a new IP filled with characters that use Marvel-like abilities.
According to Bloomberg’s sources, any game that the multi-billionaire doesn’t think will generate hundreds of millions of dollars isn’t worth the investment. As a whole, Marvel Rivals may seem to avoid the fate of being canceled, but we don’t know how much money they are paying Disney to use their worlds and characters. If the profit margin isn’t enough for the CEO, there’s a world where we could see even more drastic changes to Marvel Rivals.
If these reports are true, and we should note that NetEase spokespeople are denying these claims, we have yet another example of the poor effects billionaires are having on the gaming industry.
