A significant layoff is set to hit around 530 employees at Riot Games. Recently, Riot Games announced it’s plans to layoff 11% of it’s global workforce. According to it’s CEO Dylan Jadeja, the layoffs are largely due to the company’s incapability to maintain its high costs and it’s investments not paying off in the way they were expected too.
In his company letter, Jadeja emphasized that these layoffs were the last thing they had wanted to do and that Riot had exhausted all other options.
“…I want to be super clear about something: this is absolutely the last thing we ever wanted to do. A decision like this has a massive impact on people’s lives and on the culture of Riot,” said Jadeja
“We’re not doing this to appease shareholders or to hit some quarterly earnings number – 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,” He continued.
In his letter towards players, Jadeja announced that Legends of Runterra and Riot Forge would be the games most affected by these layoffs.
Legends of Runterra will see a significant reduction in the size of its development team, as well as a shift towards experimenting with PvE content for players within Path of Champions.
Riot Forge will see the ending of new game content following the release of Bandle Tale: A League of Legends Story. Instead Riot intends to refocus it’s efforts on its core games such as League of Legends, VALORANT, Teamfight Tactics, and Wild Rift, its Netflix show Arcane, Project L and other future esports, music, and entertainment content.
Riot is the latest game company to downsize it’s employee base because of economic concerns. More information on Riot’s future plans for the company will be revealed in the near future, fans of the company should follow their official social media pages to stay up to date.