Riot Games Headquarters, California, United States.
Riot Games, an entity of Tencent Holdings, said Friday, January 22, that it is terminating 530 workers, or around 11% of its workforce worldwide, with the teams outside of core development bearing the brunt of the layoffs.
The League of Legends producer said that since 2019, it “had made a number of big bets across the company,” which caused its costs to “grow to the point where they are unsustainable” in a blog post that also contained a message from CEO Dylan Jadeja to staff.
The company has more than quadrupled its personnel as a result of adding new talent, growing internationally, and altering its operating model to better suit its goals over the past several years.
“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.” – Dylan Jadeja, Riot Games CEO
In order to steer the firm in the direction of a more sustainable future, Riot Games will be “refocusing on fewer, high-impact projects” going ahead, such as League of Legends and Valorant. Along with discontinuing work on new games under its publishing name, Riot Forge, the video game developer is also reducing staff and features in Legends of Runeterra.
“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,” the CEO continues.
With more than 180 employees, Riot Games’ Singapore office serves as both its Asia-Pacific headquarters and one of its largest locations worldwide. The number of Singaporean employees impacted by the layoffs is unknown.
Riot Games is the most recent of several well-known digital businesses to join the hundreds of others that have made significant layoffs in their workforce. Notable corporations making these cuts include Google, Amazon, and Unilever.
