William Ding, the founder and CEO of NetEase, built one of China’s largest gaming companies by being famously frugal with licensing costs — and according to a Bloomberg report first surfaced in early 2025, that instinct nearly cost NetEase one of its biggest global hits. Ding reportedly balked at the fees Disney was charging to license Marvel characters for what became Marvel Rivals, and at one point asked the game’s artists to replace the licensed superheroes with original character designs instead, an effort that consumed time and money before NetEase ultimately reversed course and kept the Marvel license. NetEase publicly denied the account, with a company representative saying NetEase and Marvel have maintained a good working relationship since 2017. Whatever happened internally, the game that shipped in December 2024 went on to become a genuine hit, becoming a Steam bestseller at launch and generating an estimated $136 million in first-month revenue.
Layoffs Days Before a Milestone
The most jarring turn came in February 2025, when NetEase confirmed it had cut a Seattle-based design team working on Marvel Rivals, describing the move as an adjustment to “development team structure for organizational reasons” aimed at optimizing development efficiency. Game director Thaddeus Sasser and level designer Jack Burrows were among those who publicly confirmed their dismissal on LinkedIn, with Sasser noting his team had “just helped deliver an incredibly successful new franchise” before being let go. NetEase maintained that the core development team, based in Guangzhou, remained fully committed to the game’s growth, pointing to new playable characters like Human Torch and The Thing arriving that same month. The layoffs drew criticism for their timing — cutting a US design team even as the game’s success was still accelerating — but NetEase framed the core Guangzhou-based team as the game’s real center of gravity going forward.
The Game NetEase Almost Didn’t Make Kept Growing Anyway
Whatever internal hesitation preceded its launch, Marvel Rivals became one of the defining live-service hits of the past two years. By the first quarter of 2026, NetEase reported the game had surpassed 40 million players, with Season 8 — which added the character Devil Dinosaur — going live on May 15, 2026 and pushing concurrent Steam player counts back above 118,000. NetEase’s total gaming revenue reached roughly RMB 25.7 billion (about $3.7 billion) in the first quarter of 2026 alone, up 6.9% year-over-year, with Marvel Rivals cited by management as a key driver of the company’s continued international expansion alongside titles like Where Winds Meet and the long-running Fantasy Westward Journey franchise.
A Founder Known for Controlling Costs
Ding founded NetEase in 1997 and has served as its CEO since 2005, building a company that now spans online gaming, music streaming, e-commerce, and education, with 2025 revenue of RMB 112.6 billion and operating income of RMB 35.83 billion. He retains roughly a 46% ownership stake and was ranked sixth on the 2025 Hurun China Rich List with a net worth of roughly $44.9 billion. The Marvel Rivals episode, whether or not every detail of the Bloomberg report is accurate, is consistent with Ding’s broader reputation in the industry as an unusually cost-disciplined operator in a sector where rivals routinely overspend chasing hits — a trait that has helped NetEase remain reliably profitable even as competitors like Meituan posted major losses during 2025’s separate instant-retail price war.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
Ding’s reported reluctance to pay Disney’s licensing fees, followed by a costly detour into building original characters before ultimately keeping the Marvel deal, is a real cautionary example for any Philippine studio or media company negotiating an IP partnership with a major global rights holder: walking away from a licensing cost mid-project can end up more expensive than the fee itself once development time is wasted. The bigger lesson is in the sequencing — NetEase cut a proven, successful team just as the product was taking off, a decision that drew public criticism even though the game continued growing afterward, which is a useful reminder for any Philippine founder managing a distributed team across time zones that layoff timing around a visible win carries real reputational cost, not just financial calculation. Finally, Marvel Rivals’ trajectory from near-cancellation to 40 million players in about eighteen months shows that a founder’s instinct to control costs and a product’s eventual success aren’t mutually exclusive, but getting from one to the other required NetEase’s Guangzhou team to keep shipping content on a fast cadence — a discipline any live-service startup, in gaming or otherwise, has to match to retain players once the initial launch hype fades.
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