Marvel Rivals Director and Others Laid Off

Title is a little misleading. When people think game director, they think the head honcho behind the game like IceFrog for DotA, Jeff Kaplan for Overwatch. That is Guangyun Chen and he was not laid off.

These people were just part of some American team and director of some component of the game (i.e. levels).

Bonuses have to be paid out on or by March 15th for tax and accounting reasons. A lot of bonuses require employees to still be employed as of the date of payment, so a lot of companies fire employees in February or early March (after bonus amounts have been determined) so that they don't have to make those payments.

This is why so many game studios fire employees in the Spring (see, for example, the last several years of video game layoffs all heavily concentrated in the first 3 months of the year).

More insidiously, at some companies, the executives redirect the bonuses that would have gone to the laid-off employees toward themselves. That's fairly rare but it does happen, especially with game studios based out of a certain part of the world.

The buried lede here is that the developers of the game, NetEase, are Chinese and they laid off the entire North American team, which includes key people who built the game such as the director. The game is a massive success, so there’s no financial reason to do this.