Starnaut is a new roguelike bullet hell from a developer behind Devil May Cry and Okami - and it enters early access this week.
Riot and Microsoft layoffs the same, but different | This Week in Business
26.01.2024 - 19:23 / gamesindustry.biz / Dylan Jadeja
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.
It was another brutal week in the industry right from the start, with Riot Games laying off about 530 people on Monday while reciting a lot of the familiar lines we've been hearing for the past year.
QUOTE | "We're changing some of the bets we've made and shifting how we work across the company to create focus and move us toward a more sustainable future." – In the second sentence of his note to employees informing them of the cuts, Riot CEO Dylan Jadeja marks off two squares from the recent games industry layoff bingo card: "focus" and "sustainable."
He would waste little time filling in a third square as he brought up "the A-word" two paragraphs later.
QUOTE | "As CEO, I'm accountable for the changes we're making and where we're headed in the future." - Jadeja in his note.
So here's what a lot of us don't get. As the current CEO (and president for six years before that) of Riot, Jadeja was responsible for how the company was run. And as we can infer from his earlier quote, Riot was being run as an unsustainable business that lacked focus.
How exactly? Well, he goes on to talk about how Riot doubled its headcount in just a few years while making a bunch of big bets, investments that haven't paid off.
QUOTE | "We've left ourselves with no room for experimentation or failure – which is vital to a creative company like ours. All of this puts the core of our business at risk."
Yikes, that's not good. Whoever put the core of Riot's business at risk by not protecting its vital functions really pooched that one. They must all be trying to find the guy who did this.
Jadeja then goes on to talk about how the cuts aren't being done to appease shareholders or hit a quarterly earnings target.
QUOTE | "We've made this decision because it's a necessity. It's what we need to do in order to maintain a long-term focus for players."
You see? It's "a necessity." Riot simply doesn't have another move. It's been boxed in. It's in a strategically disadvantageous position.
To quote the Bob Dylan song "What Good Am I?": "If my hands are tied, must I not wonder within, who tied them and why? And where must I have been?"
This is what management is for, isn't it? They're the ones with the hand at the rudder, the ones with the necessary bigger picture view to ensure the ship is sailing smoothly where it needs to go.
But to hear Jadeja tell it, Riot management has not only run the ship aground, it put the company in a position where running the ship aground was the only option. And it did this in a
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