Maimai Leak: Bilibili Gutting In-House Game Dev 'Like ByteDance Did' — Employee Says He Was Laid Off Over May Day, ByteDance's Full Gaming Exit Adds Fuel to the Fire

Less than three weeks after ByteDance officially announced the total shutdown of its gaming division Nuverse (朝夕光年), Bilibili (B站) employees started panicking — a screenshot leaked on Maimai (脉脉, China's version of LinkedIn for tech insiders) suggested that "Uncle" (叔叔, Bilibili's CEO Chen Rui, a nickname used by the community) was about to follow suit with massive layoffs in the in-house game development department.

The OP immediately went looking for insider confirmation, and even reached out to a former classmate who worked as a game planner at Bilibili. The response was heartbreaking — the friend revealed he'd already been laid off during the May Day holiday, and had no idea what was currently happening inside the company. The layoffs came so quietly that even their own employees were caught off guard.

The post quickly drew a crowd on NGA, but the comment section was surprisingly "harmonious" — hardly anyone mourned Bilibili's self-development efforts.

The top-voted comment hit the bullseye: Bilibili has already turned itself into a "doxxing platform" (盒站, referring to the rampant human-flesh-searching and personal info leaking culture on the site) — what game studio would still spend big money advertising there? Pay for traffic only to attract a swarm of KOLs running fandom circle-jerks? Another user quickly clarified though: the layoffs target B站's self-development team, NOT the removal of all games from the platform — although given how "xian chong" (仙蛆, a derogatory term for extreme fandom stans) run wild on the site doxxing everyone, it might as well be the same thing.

When it came to the quality of Bilibili's self-developed games, the community verdict was unanimously brutal — "total trash" (一坨). One commenter stated flatly: "B站's game dev getting cut doesn't matter — they're genuinely useless. Of course the publishing side is also useless." Another was even more concise: "Uncle's self-dev wasn't always trash?" The implication was clear: nobody would miss them. The only thing that ever made money was their publishing deal for Fate/Grand Order (affectionately called BGO by players). Despite pouring mountains of cash into self-development, not a single hit emerged — their most "famous" title Sild (斯露德) became a running joke.

Many players latched onto a different concern entirely: when will Bilibili servers (B服) shut down? Multiple top comments were variations of "please kill B服 so I can migrate back to official servers." One player complained that on B服, you can't even watch in-game esports tournament streams — the experience is so bad they're desperate to "escape."

However, one comment offered a more grounded perspective. A user who claimed to have asked friends still inside Bilibili shared that this isn't a full-scale layoff — it's targeted project adjustments. The company has been running cost-cutting measures (降本增效, a corporate buzzword that became omnipresent in 2023) for two years. The core direction is to align with ByteDance's playbook: cut money-burning projects, keep the ones that are actually performing. This actually aligns with CEO Chen Rui's earlier public statements about pursuing "premium self-development" (精品自研) — except the jump from "premium self-dev" to "cut most self-dev" happened faster than anyone expected.

On ByteDance's side, the situation was even more catastrophic. A commenter confirmed: Nuverse was shut down entirely — all unreleased games were cancelled, existing games are being shopped to potential buyers, and only a handful of non-core tech operations (like engine tech) might get folded into the Douyin/TikTok group. Even Moonton, the Southeast Asian mobile gaming company (Mobile Legends developer) that ByteDance had acquired for a king's ransom, was being put up for sale. ByteDance had burned an estimated $3+ billion betting big on gaming, only to become the biggest "bagholder" (冤种) the industry had ever seen.

A former Bilibili employee even showed up in the comments to share their own story: they were laid off back in October and called it "lucky" to have gotten out early — because the current job market for game devs in Shanghai is "brutally rough." Behind that casual remark lies the harsh reality of countless workers struggling through the industry's coldest winter.

Looking back now, the gaming dreams of both ByteDance and Bilibili — two internet platform giants — ended in exactly the same way: they poured billions into the gaming arena but could never compete with established powerhouses like Tencent and NetEase, and ultimately had no choice but to cut their losses and refocus on their core platform businesses. The only difference is that ByteDance was more decisive about it, while Bilibili is still doing a slow fade-out behind the polite euphemism of "premium self-development." But for the game devs who lost their jobs in this winter, does it really matter who went first?