It's not only Riot Games. It seems like every major company has been laying off a huge percentage of their workforce, similar to last year's January. Hope this doesn't become the norm for every single year.
It does seem to be the plan and reason behind it, as I have seen someone bring up, is to make investors happy while doing cycle of hype where companies internationally over buy to lay off later and keep most investments to do it again, a thing pretty common in Tech sector.
It is all of tech, one of the only industries who had none of this during COVID. It is also in line with how tech has handled themselves. And while it is a big deal, individually for everyone affected, it isn’t much in the grand scheme of things. They will re-hire a lot of people when hype brews up, and blow many in the future again when it dies down, and so the cycle continues.
It's cuz AAA is imploding, big studio's are losing money left and right so they put more microtransactions in games and if that doesn't work they cut costs such as developers
I lost my job at EA last year due to layoffs. My friend lost his job last week at Lost Boys. The industry is on fire. I don't think people who are not involved in the day-to-day of the video game/VFX/Film/Animation community understand.. my LinkedIn is a wasteland of people announcing their layoffs, from Riot to Blizzard, Microsoft to LB. It's heartbreaking to see posts like "I'm going into month 6 of unemployment, and I've submitted over 200 applications and only had 6 interviews". The tech sphere is imploding, and it's not affecting nameless numbers, these are real people who have families, who have mortgages, people who need health coverage - for themselves or their family, or both. It's gut wrenching to watch this unfold in real time. And another thing people don't understand - even though remote work is on the rise, it's rare you get to stay where you are when you get a new job in this industry. It's not like being a doctor, or a mechanic, or a sales rep, you can't just go on down the street to the next business and apply there. Often, for games and film, if you switch studios, you move. I saw a Twitter post by a Riot employee that was pinned to their profile. They drove some 3500 miles from Toronto to LA or something in 2022 for their Riot job. Now it's gone. Where do they go? Stay in LA? Back to Canada? Sit tight and wait for the next job to make them move to Seattle or Austin or SF? It sucks.
Honestly it’s not limited to tech or devs, it’s happening everywhere. I’m in industrial supplies and the same thing is happening. I’d wager is just the result of poor money supply management and interest rates. My company is tightening spending to brace for impact as well.
league is rigged eomm and vanguard from tencent is awful, its a rookit + games are fixed at 50%, stop playing league is too good to be true! games with skins and loot boxes are designed to keep you palying no matter waht!
Y'all need to organize like the writers and actors did and flip the table. It's an unavoidable impass. You need to get paid better and less jerked around, especially in an era where people can work from home easier than ever. Unless someone takes the first step and starts hopping in Twitter dms it will continue like this and get worse
@@scott8934yea its called a recession. Wall street is trying to hide it by artificially raising numbers with things like layoffs to please big boy inverstors but eventually they will hit the bottom of what they can artificially do. We have been due a recession and market reset for a few years already but instead of a hard crash and the rebounce we are seeing a slow bleed and then rebound
Remember when we had the Lore drought? I think that's when Riot started to realize that they were focusing on too much and almost abandoned their game. 2023 really shook them down because they started that year with promises and barely managed to save it by rushing 2v2v2v2 and more on the second half of the year. What I think is disappointing though is that Riot probably got too scared by what happened last year that they might not try to expand or lay their focus on other things other than their main games anymore. Hopefully Riot doesn't do us bad anymore by not releasing Lore for 6 months again because I think that's what caused Necrit to have the ability to squeeze 20 mins of content from a 30 second video.
Is Arena really that good? is boring to see only Mordekaiser every match, at least Aram has every champ a decent winrate, Arena became boring after a few games
@@nicolasarroyo1746 it was. it served as a rest for those that got really tired of solo/duo queue. The thing with arena too is it's randomness. ARAM is good because champs are randomized. URF is good because you can try every champs. ARURF is better because it adds the randomness of champs in ARAM but in URF. But Arena is different because the champ doesn't matter much. It's in your luck and your gameplay. To me, that's less boring than playing random champs and team fights. both still good tho
League has been on a decline for years, riot knew this, its why they tried to make more games, those games just weren't the hits they had hoped for compared to league, eventually we will see league fall from its pedestal and riot will continue to shrink and eventually cease to be relevant
@@shanematthews1985 so far, the only competition of League is Valorant (atleast in my country). Riot made a game that rivals the first one which is cool because they still benefit from it. only time I felt the decline was last year because that's when the "Deft Story" ended and we got that "Cinematic" which made me lose hope.
Your closing statement is why I didn’t want to go with a snap judgment. Things suck right now for those who are affected by the layoffs, but the whole thing is super complex. Wishing people well and for them to find a new home quickly and painlessly
I already brought this up on Nickibois video on this, but Graham McNeill's story "Where Icathia once stood" to this day is the best League of Legends story I have ever read. This guy managed to make Malphite interesting. What a loss. And this is only one of 500+ extremely talented Rioters. Every single one of them will be dearly missed and deserved to be treated better. What a shame.
Imagine how frustrating it would be to feel that passionate about your projects and have access ripped away just cuz some random old dude wants more money that he can't physically spend in his lifetime lol They have created a new villain, me, someone who aspires to be a counter CEO. Someone who wants a stable and modestly luxurious life but to uplift others first. I want a fridge that makes ice. To not just create a company but a community. This has gone too far for too long
I nearly cried with the LoR mention. They said "despite our best efforts" but really didn't do anything. Not an ad, not a mention on articles and not even a shout-out on the league client. I will miss this game so much.
''Despite our best efforts'' might be THE most disingenuous quote Riot ever made. They really don't make an effort to anything that isn't a main product - they don't want to spend a single cent with marketing, hell, they don't want to even make marketing ON THEIR OWN GAMES, like you said, there were no shout-outs in the damn CLIENT. Not for LoR, not for the Riot Forge games (besides some in-game rewards for Mageseeker and Song of Nunu that people didn't even KNOW it was for those games). They have 2 actual story book releases that people don't even know about because it isn't ANYWHERE.
since riot have this laucher for all their games should be easy to just add a button in game to swich games. like a play Valorant / play LOR so u can swich games in the fly. even if no much people use it will make a lot for people at least checking the other games
I'm a multi-season masters 100+ LP player in LOR (actually high elo). I've not found a cardgame on computer that scratched my PvP itch quite like LOR did, this is honestly devastating for me.
This doesn't come as a surprise though? Riot has been talking about how LOR doesn't make them much money and they've been slowly stopping development on it for like a year now.
As a person who quit a job 2 weeks ago after being underpaid in about 3 montly paychecks, i will share my place with any fired rioter anytime. That's all sucks of course, but to be fair, thats best job quitting possible ever.
I'm not sure 530 people, they said "530 roles". So in my reading that means for example "model rigger" is a role and maybe there are 15 of them in a department, that means their role no longer exists, so all 15 are fired. I don't know if that's what they mean. It's worded ambigously.
As someone who just got into university for animation, my dream of becoming a concept artist for video games is slowly becoming too distant… if this is happening now, who’s to say that by the time I graduate from university I’ll be able to find a job in the industry? And even if I do find a job, it’s not even guarantied to be a stable one with how frequently these lay offs are happening across the board My heart goes out to all the rioters who were laid off, and creatives from other companies as well. 💔💔💔
@@mitchellb4551 Wrong. Unions are just communist bullshit meant to enslave you by throwing you a carrot and a microphone. The solution is cut the government in half and throw out all of the bureaucratic nonsense, like what Milei did in Argentina. Unions are a disgusting false recreation of medieval guilds before the *merchant's guild* started dominating politics and the market.
the CEO "takes on responsibility" by basically writting "my bad" and then gets to keep his job, title and MASSIVE pay plus bonus. WOW that's true accountability
i mean it had to happen sooner or later anyways, if they are shifting focus more on main games and bigger projects a lot of people are left with nothing to do in the company and obviously you wont pay salary to someone who isnt working on any of those games. even if higher ups would cut their checks to keep those people in, sooner or later they still would have to be fired because they dont have a part in any of the projects i mean how long can you pay someone to just exist in a company and do nothing
It’s a company, what do you expect? For it to go with less profitable way and declare bankruptcy? What they gave the devs is huge either way. What is more worrying is that it’s happening all across the industry. Sure, some projects get mid programists that were let go, but due to that there is absolutely no Junior work…
@@bgcno2 exact opposite actually, Riot dealt with this situation a lot better then some other companies. CEO or not, some things are out of your control. They pushed more smaller projects and gave people jobs, those projects did not bring any profit so there is no point in continuing trying, it's better to do something that works instead. It's business after all, I mean it is sad but it's not like it was unexpected, plus it's not like it's all CEO's fault in the first place you can't expect them to just keep paying 500+ employees for doing nothing and you can't keep those smaller projects running because it's a waste of resources
league is rigged eomm and vanguard from tencent is awful, its a rookit + games are fixed at 50%, stop playing league is too good to be true! games with skins and loot boxes are designed to keep you palying no matter waht!
man. I really enjoyed Ruined King. If it wasn't overshadowed by that shittiest event of Sentinels of Light, it could had been really cool. Tho I think Mageseeker should had been a larger game, I did enjoyed it too. Hope I can play Nunu's game and the Bandle City too.
Not interested in Convergence? I still haven't played any Riot Forge but definitely know I would enjoy Ruined King. Maybe after I finish Sea of Stars, And if things are stable for me, I'll buy Ruined King. 😊
@@ShadowPhoenix82Don't recommend buying DLC's except the skins one. I get that they're meant for supporting the devs but since Riot Forge is over it's not worth buying them.
It is so strange how Riot is now saying they over hired when just last year they were talking about being short staffed and needed more people in order to complete more projects...
Its because of a lot of promised projects? now they are losing money and are now focused on to less risky projects and now overstaffed , hence the need to cut cost
Well, one does not make the other wrong. Say I make enough money to be able to hire extra 10 emplyees. I do that and decide to start 3 extra projects each needing 4 people to be fully staffed, meaning I am short of 2 people. Now let's say the amount of money I make drops and I can't afford half of the new employees I hired. This way I have overhired, but started too many new projects and was still short staffed.
Yeah, thougth so too. All the time it was excuses that a certain game or mode couldn't be released cuz ''the team was changed cuz other projects needed more help'', and now the problem is that there were too many people?
The oddest thing to me is some of the people they sacked off are MANAGERS of major departments. They'll have to obviously fill those spots back. I mean; ' Business Development and Partnerships Manager'? How do you not have one of those. One of them is a GAME DESIGENR, NA Esports Comms Lead!?, Senior Game Producer for WR!!!, a Creative Producer for KDA/Heartsteel. And they're telling us they're refocusing on these areas? Do me a favor. They're in trouble and they know it.
This year cinematic convinces me that they know what they are doing unlike last year's one. Looking forward to the Patches honestly. Might start playing LoL again.
I agree that this practice is absolutely horrible, the "parachute" from Riot is insane all things concidered. Also a smart move to actually fire them and give them the parachute + benefits.. rather than a 6 month notice and then they lose their job at the 6 month mark. This will add to them that.. whilst it sucks losing their jobs, they feel a positive thing is still there for them.. Riot still cares in that matter.. rather than people continiously working for 6 months.. with the looming "firing" hanging over them.. morale etc. gets crushed
It was disheartening to witness when I feel like Riot is building up good things for the players for quite some time (promises on deeper lore, gameplay changes, new games, etc.) and then laying off people, who makes their IP grow and be better, instantly and through a tweet at that 😢 I hope the 11% are doing well and find new opportunities very soon!
the fact is they dont make the lp grow and make it better, its just the consequnce of diversty hires for 5 + years so you have a shit ton of usless people (most of the time even with negative output) in a companmy and now the relaize it doesnt work this way so people will be kicked out (the smart ones will kick the diversty hires out)
At the same time, the second you send this stuff to employees on this scale, you have to have a press release ready. Letting people know internally is usually going to react in heresay. The one tip would have been to have them scheduled for a meeting. Tell them in person that morning, then have the post on twitter after the meeting with the article posted a few hours later to give most people a heads up. with potentially a few employees in other timezones still having to find out the hard way if they couldnt reasonably meet at midnight if they were in china
The thing is, Riot is saying that they need to focus, reduce investment, etc. - which I do somewhat understand. The problem is, THEY are the ones that made the initial mistake to over-index in too many different projects. They spread themselves thin, over-hired, and now have to make up for that mistake.
That's the thing tho, they were constantly realocating talent from one project to another - that means they really can't have over-hired, otherwise those projects would not have really needed to syphon from other sectors to begin with. The most they did was try to back the numbers up from before the pandemic, but they never hired enough people to actually maintain the number of projects they wanted - worse yet, the ones who are being laid off are mostly from creative sections of the company. Their focus on wanting a stupid amount of profit from the time they were in their peak player count in League, but without having the patience, nor the willingness to do marketing on other projects, is almost like a child trhowing a tamper tantrum saying ''see! I knew I couldn't do it!'' after not actually trying.
Yep, they are the ones who in fail here, they admit it and they are sorry, according to that letter. But what they can do about it now? Exept generous severance pay, i mean.
I'm assuming they over hired and now they have to cut down a little but riot forge being killed sucks hard hope more people are helping with the mmo and project l and hope they don't get canned
oh man... i was laid off by my last job in a call in which they told me to "just clock out after hanging up". i didnt get any heads up beforehand that they were maybe planning on firing me, so it was incredibly upsetting. i can somewhat relate to this situation and my heart goes out to everyone who lost their job today.
The company I work for decided to do something similar. Around 8% of the company I work for got laid off. These were not roles you could do without, they were important and crucial people. No one got any info, the higher-ups did a half-assed apology and yes, it was done just to please the board and shareholders. Why? Because you'd be surprised to find out that most companies are only led by a handful of either pathologically sociopathic people, but skilled people or complete incompetents that just got there through asskissing and some minor skills that literally anyone has. It's fun to imagine having a fund set aside for situations like these, to keep things rolling for at least 2 years to stabilise and find some solutions, but no, you'd find people hard pressed to give a shit about the working drones, since after all, the current system makes top-down decisions and companies are literal autocratic entities with little to no input from the ones actually making the company work.
I think there is a difference between the league community and the runeterra one, the latter is seen as disposable because we aren't profitable enough. If league starts struggling in the next few years I wouldn't be surprised if the focus really shifts towards the east with wild rift.
@@itsgonnabeokay9341 Its just half true. If I'm remembering right, the headquarters os WR changed to China, which makes sense as it's developed by Tencent, not Riot.
What I don't get is how a company like Riot with many intelligent and capable people (despite whatever the toxic community may say), never thought of adding the games permanently on the launcher, as a reminder, and also give the option to buy the Steam games with Riot Points maybe, from the client. Honestly I want to play the games but most of the times I just forget they exist. If they were in the launcher, at some point I would buy them.
"the option to buy the Steam games with Riot Points", this is just can not happen in anyway. Steam is Valve owned, and Riot Point is owned by Riot, two companies with different practise.
As much as it's still the fault of Riot for not thinking about this sort of thing long-term back during Covid, them actually admitting to it being an issue with how they handled the situation instead of shifting blame, and continuing to support those affected for months to come, is something I wish we saw more throughout this whole ordeal. Most companies, that are equally as if not more successful than Riot, just boot everyone out the door and wish them good luck.
you wish to see more of these companies paying their employees after they leave the companies but, one of the sole reasons the employees get let go in the first place is to save money in some capacity. while making sure their former employees are financially stable is a generous thing for them to do, they should also ensure that they can find work after the fact. they cant keep paying them for free forever after all...
league is rigged eomm and vanguard from tencent is awful, its a rookit + games are fixed at 50%, stop playing league is too good to be true! games with skins and loot boxes are designed to keep you palying no matter waht!
Laid off from Square Enix west last year, and currently still in 3rd party tech but it's not the same as being internal and having a family. Still to this day have friends running a D&D campaign from Square, though, which is dope
I think making LoR a Gwent styled game that you can PvP in is a brilliant idea that might just actually save the game in the end. Then if they implement it into the rest of the worlds lore, I'm sure it'll do very well.
it hasn't done well since it launched, you think the skeleton crew left working on it are going to save it? it failed to catch on the CCG community and this shift back to PvE focus is not going to suddenly make it do well.
league is rigged eomm and vanguard from tencent is awful, its a rookit + games are fixed at 50%, stop playing league is too good to be true! games with skins and loot boxes are designed to keep you palying no matter waht!
@@crisendeep178 Companies dropping new content as 'lube' after something bad for their image happened, Blizzard is especially well known for that as everytime something involving them blows up over social media they drop content for Overwatch one way or another
@@sylvananas7923Almost makes you think that they are hoarding treasure troves of content just for moments like this that they need to pull out as a distraction 😂. Maybe that's a bit too much of a conspiracy theory but I don't think it sounds too out there.
sometimes i space out and just listen to this guy's voice and accent, its so nice to just hear even if im not paying attention to the content for a min LOL.. some reason the accent reminds me of Sp4zie's accent
It's really worrying. I'm scared the future of league and other games will be comprimised. I mean just think about it : - MANY rioters were fired out of nowhere - it being out of the blue means other rioters did not prepare to be working as less people - project will come out slower due to less rioters - and I'm pretty sure the morale is pretty low at riot so there's also less work thats gonna be done
@@_Xenux It means customer support but in Riot the official titl is Player Support. CS is the broader term. No I wasn't one of those who got laid off. I left way back in 2021.
So for the past 4-5 years, I have run a community helping people prepare for the Riot internships. From networking, resources, portfolio building, etc. I have seen several of the rioters affected come through my community and "make it", and for all of them it was a dream come true. Reading their posts announcing they got fired was truly heartbreaking, and I can say the entire community has been drastically affected by this change. It's not about the benefits/severence, these people put their heart and souls into Riot only to get their dreams crushed publically for the world to see. Tart and Zoe Crowns deserve better, along with so many affected by this.
Yes it certainly sucks but that is just the industry. Not trying to be overly cold or anything because I do hope all of these employees are able to find jobs in similar fields that being said they were able to work at their dream job which few can boast. Again I hope they are able to move on to jobs they are just as passionate about.
@@masonguthrie1257 trust me, I am well aware. I tried to take that stance, but I know a lot of the people affected and my heart breaks for them. I know it's just the industry, and I know they got to do something people only dream of doing, but that doesn't mean we can't hurt with them.
On the LoR front, I'm one of those players that basically exclusively plays the Path of Champions. I played a bit of the regular card game (like, 10-20 games total), but never went too deep on it. However, through just the PvE mode, I've unlocked almost all of the region rewards (only have 2 regions left).
To understand this, we need to also understand how the world and US economy is affecting everyone. In general, a company’s net income can be boiled down to “Revenue - Expenses = Net Income”. Even if a company has record revenue, expenses have also increased over the last couple years due to interest rates and inflation which makes that “net income” number MUCH lower, and even possibly negative. It’s an unfortunate circumstance and it sucks to see this happen across the tech and gaming industries this year. Hopefully everyone affected can land on their feet and find a well-paying position elsewhere quickly.
It will. The reduction of lore is the death of a game. You HAVE to have a hardcore base for a story to grow interest in more exterior player groups. Otherwise, if you don't have your hardcore lore players, its just less advertisement essentially, and less involvement, and less involvement decreases the hardcore base even further. The creation of exterior games was something my wife and I always looked forward to and loved, and it made us feel like the company was healthy and here to stay. Taking that away feels like the well went stagnant.
a load of bullshit - around 95% of lol playerbase doesn't care about the lore. and reduction of lore won't really affect the playerbase, you don't play for lore, you play for the gameplay and the excitement the win brings you. playing lore is like eating grass for taste - it doesn't really taste great and is just a shallow experience. AND most of the people following lore doesn't really play either.
Not really mate. As a music journalist - it is coming for all of us. Nobody is reading long reviews anymore, nobody is playing as a band, because paying for the band is too expensive and nobody is appreciating the lore and stuff around this anymore. We as a people are doing things soo fast right now, that we want's to go on a game, play it and don't care about the lore, world around it etc. Pandemic was supposed to slow our lifes but actually it speeded it up, so the riot move is sad but understandable
My friend this is corporate world. It is always about shareholders. Thats exactly how it happens in every large corpo. This is a cycle, neutral or red line appears layoffs happen. Green line appears they start hiring. Currently we experience post covid slow down. Massive value rise stopped and companies start "savings" . Its not just the TECH sector. Its pretty much every massive corpo eg. lets say.. Pfizer etc. This is a cycle and as we can see it keeps on going.
Every large company in tech has been cleaning house, I think it's the current trend. During covid, companies scaled very high with remote work and just in general. We are still coming down from that massive scaling, almost coming back to pre-covid norms it seems
That is how layoff work at major tech companies because a few bad people will use their access to damage the company on the way out the door. For this reason good people can't be warned they are getting laid off ahead of time because a few bad apples could start deleting databases and source code. You learn you are laid off when your access to the network gets blocked.
@@thee-sportspantheon330 Most people don't plan their revenge ahead of time that is just sociopathic, but this is the type of person that prevents IT companies from warning people they are getting laid off before removing their system access. People like this are more likely to want to do something once they learn they are being let go.
Even then, I hope they got decent packages on the way out, some pay etc. I don't see why they can't simply lay people off privately first and then make it public?
Tech companies always have these mass layoffs from time to time then they have a mass hiring. That industry is the most unpredictable when it comes to job security. In my opinion it’s to get rid of those that have reached the wage cap then they can hire interns and entry levels at a much lower wage. Just my opinion but this also happens in the restaurant industry when I was part of for many years.
I know you don't enjoy spending your valuable time and energy on Riot (as you stated in a previous video, it's a sinking ship). But I really REALLY appreciate you taking that time and energy to help us (me) stay informed. You're so wonderful!
@@soroushkowsarian3364 China are bringing out rules for gaming, everything from spending limits to stopping login rewards. This has made every gaming company's market value drop by billions with Tencent being the worse off.
@@soroushkowsarian3364 china tried to curb gacha mechanics by enforcing some rules upon big game companies (tencent, etc...) = less revenue = stock got sold = stock trades lower, but read somewhere that it didn't go through. It's very chaotic and unstable with politics in china i guess
@@soroushkowsarian3364 probably because of China's anti-gambling law that's in development. this would affect gacha/loot boxes which big for a company like Tencent for obvious reasons
I'm glad you acknowledged the HR side of layoffs-- as shitty as it is, it's standard in the tech industry. Also, 6 months severance with maximum bonus is INSANE. That is by far the most generous cut I've ever seen.
As someone who got laid off last year, I know how terrible it is and hope they find an opportunity soon. In 2022, my (previous) company laid off over 3000 people in 2022, a similar amount in 2023 (which included me) and soon about 1500 announced. Hang in there, everyone!
Isn't this the company that claimed they couldn't have a cinematic last year due to staffing? Truthfully I had let go of that but now we get a cut? Yikes, Riot has truthfully taken my heart over the years. The world that has been built is phenomenal from all sources, outside games like ruined king and mageseeker really added a lot of depth to the world. I do hope that Ruit will be able to continue the same amount of amazing content with less people. I'm sure it's hard for everyone around.
anyone who has worked in larger companies should know most of the employees do absolutely nothing all day, most if not all large companies could cut their workforce by 70% and have no problem if the remaining 30% are efficient workers. The problem is identifying efficient and slackers without using a quota system since itll bring more lower quality work .
6 months of severance with benefits and they'll not immediately drop off so i'd say at the least 7 months of continued pay, they'd have to be completely incapable to not be doing perfectly fine for themselves
the reason for so many indie games gaining attention over the big ones is mostly the bad decisions the companies make aiming for pure profit and often just throwing together whatever works leading to so many bad soulless copy paste AAA games you keep seeing. Indie developers on the other hand rarely expect their game to go viral or have big funding so they do what they want to and actually care. Which even big companies developers do but thier passion may not matter in the face of a money hungry company looking for easy profits.
I've seen some people take the 6 month support as a sign the now-unemployed shouldn't feel AS bad about this. While it's great Riot did that as an attempt to cushion this, especially compared to other companies- the people that lost their jobs, Riot was likely their dream job. Sad to see, really. Had a simmilar dream once. Best of luck and much morale to the people that got laid off!
To be exactly, Riot rarely fire, so many employees treated the Riot campus like their second home. Going in and out of the campus was part of their life for so long, and eventually long working ppl with rare layoff created a community within it. Now it's been half of their life, many have hard time to move on.
Also, in all of these layoffs, from each company, quite often people getting fired find out via social media instead of a private contact. This seems evil at first but it's to prevent disgruntled fired employees from going apeshit while they still have access to stuff like the source code
i dont care if a company has layoffs a business is a business but i care about how its handled and i think it was handled super well while its sad they got fired with everything they did to help out the people who got fired i got to give props to riot because since it was 530 people trade secrets worries are a real issue, my opinion
My bet is that due to new Chinese laws and Tencent loosing a tramendous amount of shares (about 20%), and is cutting a lot on Riot games. It's way too close between one another to dismiss as nothing
Love how these tech companies are making "record profits" yet still fire hundreds. But don't worry I'm sure the CEOs will raise their pay and bonuses!!
You have to take into account that riot also expands continuously. They have not only league, where big changes just came but also even more are coming soon, Valorant, LoR, project L on the horizon as well as the MMO plus the Riot Forge games and Arcane. So all of those "record profits" are being spent instantly.
Riot is NOT legally required to include 6 months pay in a severance package. This almost seems like GOOD news for the people getting laid off. Nothing but respect for their decision to treat their employees so well.
As much as this sucks, it’s happened to me as well - one of my past jobs, I had access to prod servers (web programmer), so when layoffs came in the IT depts, we were given the news one at a time, escorted off site by security one at a time, and given 30 days paid leave, because they normally give 30 days notice but couldn’t risk the access that the IT people had, so…
It is really not that easy and calling them "idiots" is just - sorry - straight up ignorant. Markets change and companies must adapt. If they don't, in the end that could have even more severe impacts on the company and a higher amount of layoffs could then be needed. Believe me, if it was always so easy for companies to predict the market 100% correctly, they would. Layoffs this size also demand a lot of planning and restructuring for the company which is expensive. They would be far better off if they could keep the employees knowing that they will get a return of invest for paying them. The video game industry is harsh and especially esports organisations and companies around esports had to go through a lot of challenges in the past few years. The market and ecosystem is very fragile and often unpredictable. It will stabilise as it matures. After all, it is still a very young industry. Be happy that there are companies and entrepreneurs taking risks. Be happy there are companies like Riot constantly comming up with new projects, games and even an own Netflix series. They only know it's working out once released and there is a lot of risk involved. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. That's the game and doesn't have anything to do with the company just acting careless around their employees. I know of cases where companies tried to avoid layoffs in the hopes of "making it" with them. In the end, the financial situation got so bad that not only a few employees had to be laid off - but entire departments. The belief that CEO's and top management people are always just evil isn't right. Sometimes things just turn out to be economically unsustaineable and then measures must be taken for the sake of saving the rest of the company.
@@florianbenken4355you’re 100% spotted on. Unfortunately people who doesnt work in the general industry will associate their knowledge with easy accessible such as movies.
What a waste of our time. Some of us got kinda excited about the lore again thanks to the cinematic and now this. Hope the employees can find a job soon, they still after all the most affected by this
@@masonguthrie1257 LoR served as world-building for the universe as well as an experimentation tool. It gave us plenty of art. Riot forge was another way to tell these stories and they were the main ways to get lore now. Cool for you if you only care about a 4 min cinematic every year, but some of us are passionate about this game and its lore
@@fae567but that's the gag. Not enough of you cared to find that other stuff, y'all were happy in the main client. So should Riot literally set money on fire for the sake of art? At the end of the day the projects need to be profitable so stuff like the fighting game or mmo absolutely need to be focused on. It's unfair for the workers but realistically if this gets us fewer but higher quality spin offs like Xylas', Nunu's, or Ekko's then it's ultimately a smart choice
I've heard some crazy stories about full time Rioters that didn't do a whole lot of work... and it made sense when you looked at the amount of stuff Riot had a finger on. That said tho I don't think a massive wave of lay-offs is the solution.
Thank you for trying to explain the whole situation to the masses. Too many of clueless reactionary people acting like Riot is the worst company ever when that is not even true in the slightest, in fact Riot is better than the average American big companies....
This news is tearing me apart. Simply put. I'm just so heartbroken at this point that I can't do much else but wallow in it. I hope the industry levels out, and these folks can find more work. I also hope that Runeterra will still continue to grow and change from this. I don't want this to be the end. Not yet.
I’m feeling the same worry and melancholy that I felt recently as a hearthstone fan when they announced that Duels mode was being sunset as well. Sad to see my favorite games struggling and the people that make that in trouble
RiotForge was the best riot content we got since the Burning Tides event years ago and Arcane, I hate to see creativity being shut down like this. Moreover it was a great way to expand league lore, which up until... always ? Feels stagnant, there's no progression in anything. At least we'll still see Project L and hopefully the MMO, if they don't drop it like everything else. Personally : Mageseeker showed Sylas's growth from a vengeance driven killer into a leader. RuinedKing was one of the best rpg experience I had AND managed to give us what most people wanted, lore PROGRESSION. Song of Nunu felt junky sometimes and not as "fluid" or even "finished" but I still had a blast.
Not yet ! The game will still live for sometime. Until they consider they really can't do anything about it. But it's going to be under Meddler direction like League, Valorant, TFT etc. if I am not mistaken. So maybe, just maybe the game will survive this horrible crisis.
Every company needs to trim the fat and get rid of departments that aren't performing well. This is just business and it's really not a big deal. We've all been laid off and it sucks but let's not blow it out of proportion.
Sure, getting fired sucks, but that is a fat ass severence package. Much better than anyone in a diferent area gets. Wish I got a fraction of that when my previous company had layoffs.
LoR had so much potential and they never properly used it. I dont know what happened with the content pipeline or whoever makes the business decisions regarding LoR, but they seriously should have had way more cosmetics and a RANDOMIZER button so that we didn't need to actively swap our stuff all the time. Plus the lack of marketing, and the lack of integration in the league client... it's all so frustrating for them to go "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas so byebye LoR"
People shitting on riot, ignoring the fact covid had a huge impact on the whole industry and it wasn't something people expected, and more so that - at the end of the day it's business and not a charity fund. It is truly sad and my heart goes to those who got laid off, but if riot wants to continue existing, it needs to make these hard decisions sometimes. Hopefully they learned their lesson, so something like that wouldn't happen again.
I was hired at a hospital during covid, and after covid, I was given a 2 month notice to increase my performance by accomplishing a lot of extra work along with the exhausting amount I've been doing. I did my best for 2 weeks and lost hope. Luckily, i had 6 weeks to find another job and luckily found one 3 weeks later. I hold no grudges and appreciate the experience.
I was laid off with 8 other people in a corporate job ( they let us go to have customer service be in a different state rather than the corporate office ) . We were all pulled into a room and told we were let go and then the email went out to the company about it. We were escorted out of the office not allowed to clean our desk until another day with security. I was given a month of severance and my health benefits until the end of the month.
Indie games are amazing, the give players a breath un terms os stories or gameplays etc. Hope riot forge team could create their own developer enterprised or something
All of these devs and artists getting fire from these companies means that there's going to be an oversaturation of the market in games soon, a lot more new companies and indie devs are going to spawn from this cause people gotta eat
This is quite the opposite. They are cutting all side projects to bet EVERYTHING on LoL, the MMO, and Project L. I hate it. I think they're killing the golden goose, personally. Those games may not have been directly financially profitable, but they collaborated to build a whole long-term, developed player culture around their IP. With this, they kill that in order to squeeze every drop out of their cash cows as quickly as possible.
At least when it comes to LoR and the champions to come, I'm pretty sure the team always worked like a year in advance for coming expansions. So I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the card releases for 2024 were already planned and done in 2023.
My opinion is that, any large sized organization that wants a change, they have to fire a meaningful amount of employees, aka restructure. If not doing that, any policy change will be hardly effective at all. Since the same large amount of people working with the same way they do until end of time. People are hard to change. Take an example of balancing the game. How do you suddenly doing good changes without changing the people doing that job? I hope this is a good change after all.
500 rioters at 50k a years = 25 millions dollars a year (could be more considering extra expenses). I wonder how much the Ceo and the others High pay employes get. Pretty sure that they could just lower their own pay instead, but u know, money.
@@skillgamer76there should be regulations that cap it at 100k. Why does a random person get to take the lion's share of someone else's creativity? How did anyone think this was sustainable? Oh, they didn't?
It really sucks they had to fire all these people BUT as a League player I'm really glad that they promise to give the game more attention now. I think Riot was spread too thin recently.
I miss working for Riot. They told us we were doing well, we were hitting targets so we don't understand why they want to let us go. It was like breaking up with someone you love but you can't do anything about it but accept.
You very likely were doing well and hitting targets. I think everything they say in the announcement as their justification is a load of BS. They wanted to increase the company's share price. The easiest way to do that is to cut costs. The easiest way to cut costs is layoffs.
I believe that Riot Forge not making more games will be a heavy blow because i know a lot of friends that didn't like or have a skill issue with league of legends and loved ruined king and legends of runeterra. Now riot have only one way of spreading their name out of the bubble and that is Arcane, i would like to thank the lux players who are investing on Arcane! The community can't be more grateful ❤
Holy shit. I wished I got a tiny fraction of the severance benefits that these rioters got. Or even just the career assistance program. Would have been nice to get some sort of help in getting a job, moving forward.
I play League and then I also play Destiny 2! Bungie also did the same thing. Just apart of life. Layoffs are normal. Yes it’s sad and support to these hard workers are definitely needed. No need to be toxic, just how it is. Eventually it happens to everyone. However I would say a lot of the gaming industry struggles with communication, clarity and management.
Im really sad for riot forge, The ruined king, Mageseeker ,song of Nunu and now Bandletale, all of it gave me a gaming experience i haven't gotten in a while. It was me in first grade going back home to play Zuma or Insaniquarium all over again. Just sad sad day for the comunity.
I watch many different Riot news creators talk about this but I must say this was the most thorough analysis of the incident. Necrit, I wanted to let you know that your dedication is well appreciated and respected! Please let that be known ❤️
