Riot Games announced laying off 530 employees earlier today, almost 11% of its entire staff.
Riot Games, the makers of League of Legends and VALORANT, announced that it will be laying off 530 workers worldwide. The mass layoff will impact most of the company’s non-development teams, comprising almost 11% of the Riots’ workforce. Furthermore, Riot Games declared it would shut down Riot Forge, a subsidiary of Riot that collaborated with other developers to produce more compact, single-player games like The Mageseeker and Song of Nunu.
Riot Games became the newest company in the industry to hit with layoffs after Twitch and Unity. Earlier this month, live streaming platform Twitch and game engine developer Unity laid off almost 2,300 employees from those companies. Last year, it was estimated that nearly 10000 people in the video games industry lost their jobs. And, just a month into 2024, the video game industry is already facing massive layoffs.
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Riot Games Hit With Mass Lay-Offs
Riot Games’ CEO, Dylan Jadeja, posted on the official Riot Games website that the layoffs are mainly because the company has “too many things underway.” Jadeja admitted that the company made some “bad bets” during its rapid growth since 2019. Because of those bad bets, the publisher had to make tough decisions, resulting in mass layoffs.
“Today, we’re a company without a sharp enough focus, and simply put, we have too many things underway. 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.
Over the past several months, we’ve tried to alter our trajectory in many different ways.
hiring slowdowns, and in some cases hiring freezes.
We put an emphasis on controlling costs while strengthening our revenue growth.
All of which has without a doubt been tough for our teams.
But as I’ve dug in with leaders across Riot, it’s become clear to all of us that these changes aren’t enough.
We have to do more to focus our business and center our efforts on the things that drive the most player value – the things that are truly worth players’ time.
Dylan Jadeja, Riot Games CEO
Jadeja mentioned that the company had been trying to control costs throughout the last several months but ultimately failed, forcing it to lay off a chunk of its workforce. However, because of the layoff, the Legends of Runterra team was also downsized due to the low financial performance of the game.
Shutting Down Riot Forge
Mentioning Riot Forge, Jadeja said that the company will now focus on its current games, including League of Legends, VALORANT, Teamfight Tactics, and Wild Rift. Riot Forge will be shut down because Jadeja no longer views it as “central to our strategy going forward.”
Jadeja clarified that even though Riot Forge shuts down, the players can still experience single-player games. Moreover, Jadeja added that Riot Games will work on single-player titles in the future “if the right project comes along.”
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