Image: NetEase Games
NetEase Games almost swapped out Marvel superheroes with its own original characters.
Game publisher NetEase Games’ new hero shooter Marvel Rivals has proven to be an immense success for the company. The game recently passed the milestone of having 40 million players in advance of its big Season 1.5 update, but all of this success almost eluded the publisher.
According to a recent Bloomberg report, NetEase came close to cancelling Marvel Rivals entirely because it didn’t want to pay Disney for the use of its iconic Marvel heroes and villains.
Marvel Rivals was almost cancelled according to new report
A recent Bloomberg report was published over the weekend, diving into NetEase Games CEO Ding Lei, also known as William Ding, causing massive change within the company by cutting hundreds of jobs, closing game studios and winding down international investment. This followed the company firing a Seattle-based group of developers who worked on Marvel Rivals last week, one of whom was said to be its game director.
The report also revealed that the company had mulled over cancelling Marvel Rivals entirely prior to its release. This was due to Ding’s own objections over paying the Walt Disney Company to use Marvel Comics characters in the game. To get around this issue, NetEase even went so far as to ask its artists to “swap in their own hero designs,” an expensive move that ultimately cost the company “millions of dollars.”
However, the report notes that a NetEase spokesperson denied this account, citing the company’s close partnership with Marvel since 2017. According to the report, Ding now wants NetEase to avoid pursuing games that are “unlikely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars per year.”
Reportedly, this has already resulted in NetEase shutting down or stopping work at various studios like Ouka in Japan, Worlds Untold in Canada, and Jar of Sparks in the U.S., while also shrinking its overseas investment team. Some studios have been “given time to wrap up ongoing projects,” while others are talking with potential new game publishers.
NetEase’s very first U.S. studio Jackalope Games is said to be working on a Warhammer MMORPG, but the future of that game is now in question given the company’s current skittishness in overseas-made games. Another report from Game File claims that the company is “actively shopping around more of its non-Chinese studios.”
For its part, Marvel Rivals is still doing rather well for NetEase. Even after laying off a few of the game’s developers last week, the game has successfully launched its Season 1.5 update with new playable characters The Thing and The Human Torch, and even teased an upcoming character: Blade.
