Riot Games to lay off "around 530" people and shut down Riot Forge label in push for "sustainability"

23.01.2024 - 19:56 / rockpapershotgun.com / Dylan Jadeja / Lay Off

Riot Games have announced that they will shortly lay off "about 530" people, or 11 per cent of their global workforce, so as to "create focus and move us towards a more sustainable future", in the words of CEO Dylan Jadeja. The "biggest impact" will be felt outside of core development, though they'll affect at least one major internal team - the developers of Legends Of Runeterra. Riot are also binning off the Riot Forge publishing label, under which third-party developers create smaller-scale games based on Riot's own intellectual properties.

In a blog post, Jadeja went into the reasoning behind the layoffs, which he represented as fallout from "a number of big bets across the company" since 2019. The post doesn't specify which particular big bets have failed, but Riot's grander strategic ventures over the past three-four years include plans for Riot-brand TV, movies and music, several studio acquisitions, and some publicly disastrous crypto partnerships.

"We jumped headfirst into creating new experiences and broadening our portfolio, and grew quickly as we became a multi-game, multi-experience company - expanding our global footprint, changing our operating model, bringing in new talent to match our ambitions, and ultimately doubling the size of Riot in just a few years," Jadeja wrote.

"Today, we're a company without a sharp enough focus, and simply put, we have too many things underway," the post continues. "Some of the significant investments we've made aren't paying off the way we expected them to. Our costs have grown to the point where they're unsustainable, and 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."

Riot have attempted to "alter our trajectory" in various ways over the past months, slowing or freezing hiring programmes, and asking team leaders to make "trade-offs", but it hasn't been enough. Jadeja insisted that the layoffs don't reflect pressure from investors, and aren't simply designed to boost the company's numbers ahead of the next financial earnings call. "We're not doing this to appease shareholders or to hit some quarterly earnings number," he wrote. "We've made this decision because it's a necessity."

Laid-off staff will receive a minimum of six months salary as severance pay, including a notice period, with staff who have been employed for longer receiving more. Where Riot provide healthcare benefits, they'll continue to the last day of employment, after which Riot will offer additional pay to cover health benefits equal to the length of severance pay or rounded up to the whole month. The full post outlines a range of other support measures for