Riot dropped a bombshell at the start of 2024 by laying off 11% of its total staff. There are a lot of questions concerning this move and the timing of it being out of the blue. While layoffs are bad news, Riot has explained the reasons for the layoff and why none of these changes are going to affect the core Riot games, which are Valorant, Wild Rift, TFT, and League of Legends.
Who got the sack?
The two departments that got hit hard with layoffs are the Riot Forge department and Legends of Runeterra. Riot Forge was in charge of developing small mini-games within League of Legends, which involved a team of indie game developers. Legends of Runeterra, at the same time, was a free-to-play digital card collector game. Riot says that they will be focusing on the other core departments and allocating resources to the growth of those games for now. Legends of Runeterra will now focus only on the Path of Champions mode, as Riot iterated that the game costs were not being covered by the revenue it generated, and hence, they had to make this call. The employees who were included in the layoff are set to be given a generous severance package of 6 months’ pay and a ton of other benefits.
Is Riot going through a crisis situation?
While it seems that Riot is going through a tough time, we have to understand the fact that Riot has numerous other projects that are not related to gaming. The overall success of Arcane and the work that has to be put in require a lot of attention. A lot more manpower hired for projects such as Arcane has led to twice the number of employees in the company as compared to a few years back. With the number of projects Riot had in its arsenal, it was inevitable that a few had to be cut down to maintain a healthy growth overall.
Riot also stated that these changes were not to impress the shareholders by cutting down overall costs but rather to accommodate the growth the existing projects have. Many seem to assume that Riot made these changes because it was bleeding costs and too much bleeding might lead to shareholders backing out. Riot has dismissed those claims and states that this decision was made to make space for more growth using the existing successful projects and not just to cut down overall costs.
What’s Next?
As of now, Riot hasn’t hinted at any other layoffs and is focusing on the existing ecosystem. There have been rumors of cutting overall expenses for LAN events, and I hope this applies to the relatively smaller Riot titles. Core games like Valorant and League of Legends have not been affected by these layoffs, and we can expect both these core titles to be fully functioning with regular updates and events throughout 2024. The Road to Champions for Valorant has already been announced. The Madrid Masters is the next big event that we will get to watch, and by the production standards, we will be able to get an idea of what lies ahead for Riot Games.
