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Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead
- stillasleep 3y agoi hope the mmo survives
- latexr 3y agoBeginning of the third paragraph: > This means we’re eliminating about 530 roles globally, which represents around 11% of Rioters, with the biggest impact to teams outside of core development.
- asylteltine 3y agoAny time I see a title that talks about the future, changes, a message from, etc I assume it’s some ceo bullshit talking around doing layoffs
- opisthenar84 3y agoA seemingly common theme through all these layoffs is that engineers are less impacted than other orgs.
- stg22 3y agoIn general, the more direct the impact of your role on short-term revenue, the safer you are when your company starts sacrificing people to the gods of quarterly accounts. Ancillary service workers always get hit badly, but good salespersons are often safer than good engineers.
- resolutebat 3y agoOnly if their salesperson manages to hit their number very quarter without fail. I've seen people blow their quota out of the water in Q1, and get shitcanned when Q2 is quiet.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoThat is exactly what sales is like, and it has been like that, for as long as I can remember. However, good salespeople can make a lot of money.
- jncfhnb 3y agoSo can mediocre lucky ones. A lot of systems are very poorly designed.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoFamous sales pep talk: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wVQPY4LlbJ4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=wVQPY4LlbJ4
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoThis is HN, so it’s Always Be Coding
- smt88 3y agoThis is true with all layoffs. If you can't explain your direct role in creating your product/service, you're going to be higher on the chopping block. Sales, marketing, HR, admins, PMs, etc. are usually the first to go because they don't "keep the lights on" and it's hard to measure their impact. While it's true that it's also hard to measure a single engineer's impact, it's scarier to fire someone who may be expensive to replace and who may take institutional knowledge of the inner workings of the product with them.
- resolutebat 3y agoSales does not belong on that list, since their impact is the easiest of all to measure ($$$). Also, top-down layoffs tend to target expensive staff with large paychecks, without accounting for institutional knowledge or intangible value delivered.
- conductr 3y agoEasy to measure isn’t always good. If the org tends to sell $5m per sale person and they try to scale it by hiring it might just fall to $4m per sales person. When things go under the microscope, they’ll want to put that back in balance by reducing heads.
- beau_g 3y agoIs it though? Without products there are no sales at all. A compelling enough product will sell with no marketing/sales effort, so sales is really only whatever that baseline is + (extra units sold from sales and marketing efforts - cost of sales of marketing). I would think this is actually quite hard to measure, you also have to normalize against many external market factors and behavior of competitors.
- tryauuum 3y ago> A compelling enough product will sell with no marketing/sales effort would it? maybe you are talking about video games and a good enough game would sell itself. But for other businesses sales / marketing / ads do matter. Imagine you provide a 50% better service than your competitors, but you target audience never reaches your page because they are bombarded with google ads of your competitors
- whatyesaid 3y agoHow do you know who they're firing? Nobody knows what "core tech" is. They are clearly getting rid of people in LoR. And game companies aren't bloated with sales people.
- cannonpalms 3y agoThere are typically crowdsourced spreadsheets available from https://layoffs.fyi https://layoffs.fyi that cover title, etc.
- catlover76 3y agofairly generous severance terms
- latchkey 3y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39097245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39097245
- mxwsn 3y agoClosely related, but not a duplicate. This post explicitly calls out services and products that will continue to be supported, like world's, musical collaborations like KDA, the Arcane anime, and upcoming Project L.
- wildknocker 3y ago> This isn’t to appease shareholders or to hit a quarterly earnings number—it’s a necessity. I smell BS
- phone8675309 3y agoIt's a necessity to make line go up forever
- MaxHoppersGhost 3y agoEveryone overhired the last 3 years thinking the good times were forever. They’re probably overloaded with roles they don’t need anymore and have needs in other places so it really doesn’t make sense to keep folks.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoI assume video-game sales went up during the stay-at-home pandemic years; with that now behind us, this isn’t surprising at all. In fact, I’m surprised this didn’t already happen a year ago.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoIt did indeed start a year ago. Main reason it's ramping up so rapidly in the last 6 months is that games were released (in what many would consider an amazing years for games in 2023) and layoffs tend to happen a bit after shipping (to get launch bugs). But with the current economy the layoffs are more severe. Another less talked about point is GaaS. Many, many studios were trying to ramp up games with continuous revenue streams, and that needs a big investment and risk. It's not ubcommon to launch 10 GaaS expecting 7 to fail and 1 to easily pay for the other 9's developments. That's a great strategy with free money. Awful when you need to weather a storm. And now we're on that storm. Even studios with successful GaaS have to reel back, so most games in development are SoL. So, not surprising but the volume this year is immense.
- krainboltgreene 3y ago> Everyone overhired the last 3 years thinking the good times were forever. It's very convenient that this isn't measurable and if you asked anyone in the industry at the time they most likely would have said "We don't have nearly enough" people.
- chris_wot 3y agoThese severance packages seem pretty reasonable, and they aren't trying to BS too much. I guess this is the best way you can do this thing.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y agoThey also list specific projects they're cutting, and for one of them, explain why.
- matt3210 3y agoTheir careers page is disabled.
- sour-taste 3y agoWe'll see how long that lasts. That's the shitty part of these layoffs: as soon as the negative PR dies down hiring resumes for less tenured employees that aren't as expensive (fewer stock grants, lower starting salaries). No matter how they phrase it in their letters this is always about making more money and dropping expensive employees is one way they'll do it.
- joshuamcginnis 3y agoMinimum six months severance pay + healthcare + cash bonus. That is incredibly generous all things considered.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoYeah to be honest, a half-year sabbatical with time to job hunt non-frantically is a luxury I've never had. I love my current job, but I would probably look at a half year severance like a vacation.
- hipadev23 3y ago> non-frantically It appears to be very heavily biased toward artists, so even if they start that job hunt today, it’s still going to be frantic.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoThat is indeed a fair point.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- johnnyanmac 3y ago6 months for an artist with Riot on their resume? I can't imagine that not at least opening doors for them.
- 0xjmp 3y agoIn this current job market 6 months to next job is a very quick turnaround...
- mlhpdx 3y agoCan you explain? Unemployment is still very, very low and there are hundreds of thousand of open positions out there. Not sure about game companies, hence my asking.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- paxys 3y agoNot a fan of any of their games, but I'm so glad this didn't affect Arcane.
- thot_experiment 3y agoIt's absolutely wild how good Arcane is, especially considering League imo has the absolute worst aesthetic quality of any popular game. I'm glad they didn't let any of the art directors for the game (does the game even have art directors?) meddle with the show.
- Blackthorn 3y ago> does the game even have art directors? We know it has somebody with a foot fetish. Look at the footwear of all the female characters (at least the ones made before 2016, I haven't played it since then). I did try to watch some recent games and while it looks like the gameplay itself has improved since then, the effect visuals have somehow managed to get even more blended and difficult to read. How do they manage to fail this badly at it for so long?
- mjr00 3y ago> We know it has somebody with a foot fetish. Look at the footwear of all the female characters (at least the ones made before 2016, I haven't played it since then). ehh?? On the character models or splash arts? I've played for a long time and have never heard anyone else say this, outside of the French Maid Nidalee skin[0] which is obvious foot fetish bait. The most notable foot-related art commentary was always around "pizza feet" which was the low-poly, pizza-shaped feet of the character models. [0] https://lol.fandom.com/wiki/French_Maid_Nidalee https://lol.fandom.com/wiki/French_Maid_Nidalee ... moderately nsfw?
- Blackthorn 3y ago> ehh?? On the character models or splash arts? Splash arts generally. Almost every single one is wearing heels. Once you notice it you can't stop seeing it.
- asylteltine 3y agoWhy is everyone doing layoffs at once? Is it just in the news now or are they taking advantage of everyone else doing it?
- 0xjmp 3y agoI think Sundar Pichai put it succinctly: “durable cost savings”
- rishav_sharan 3y agoDecember marks the end of the fiscal year for many companies, making January an ideal month for "organisational realignment and adjustment".
- OnionBlender 3y agoProbably don't want the bad PR from doing layoffs before Christmas.
- qqqwerty 3y agoFWIW, severance is usually a lump sum, so it absolutely benefits the employees to wait until the new year because the severance will likely get taxed at a lower tax bracket.
- gambiting 3y agoDoesn't tax year run April to April where you live? That's the case in the UK, so it would have made absolutely no difference to how it's taxed.
- disgruntledphd2 3y agoThat's just a weird UK thing I think.
- devjab 3y agoThe economy isn’t doing so well and it’s not going to correct itself any time soon. It’s not really that noticeable on the larger scale but any company that produces anything non-digital is still having supply line issues. Not as bad as a few years ago, but still bad enough to cost the global economy a lot of potential growth. Then there is the higher interest rates, which in themselves are an issue for the economy. Not so much because companies “need” to borrow money as such, but because the ridiculously low interest rates made it easier to make more money since you could fund things with money you didn’t have, since it was basically free to do so. A lot of places even sort of dropped the ball on this, not locking in the rates on their loans because, well, because we’re collectively rather stupid, so many organisations are looking at making deals with banks to find some reasonable place to land these loans in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone too bad. There is more to it than that, but the over all result is that a long with the inflation (which may have stopped but it’s not like prices are dropping just because they paused increasing) wage stagnation and so on, is that there is a lot less purchasing power and willingness both in the investment and in the consumer markets. You can say that companies over hires during the COVID lock downs, which isn’t really wrong, but we’re also sort of in a recession that we have collective agree not to talk about. Partly because it’s a weird recession considering the job market is hot.
- mariya12 3y ago[flagged]
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoEvery year Riot releases a new cinematic for League of Legends to celebrate the start of the season. Last year they released the worst cinematic in all of their history. This announcement makes me wonder if their sudden rapid growth was at least partially the reason for why they ended up shipping such a bad video. In the last year Riot also started to sell severely overpriced skins, despite a lot of outrage from the community. With their lootbox system you basically only guaranteed certain skins if you spent like $200, which many players complained was inaccessible for them. Maybe this was a sign that financials were not in a great place for the company.
- darkwizard42 3y agoLast year I believe the company they were working with had issues and they had to scrap together something urgently. No comment on the other aspects but I suspect they are still printing money (comparing to Fortnite and Valve)
- clovoak 3y agoGot a link to the cinematic you mention? Haven't heard of it.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoSure! In order to set a bit of context... First watch the 2022 cinematic [0], to get an idea of what they normally ship. Then watch the 2023 cinematic [1], to see how badly they messed up. And just to drive the point home, compare it with the 2024 cinematic [2] which is a return to form. If you look at the 2023 cinematic in a vacuum it might seem generic and uninspired, but then when you compare it with the 2022 and 2024 cinematics the quality gap becomes apparent. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDYqT0_9VR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDYqT0_9VR4 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJT5d5Ue3ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJT5d5Ue3ao [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHhqwBwmRkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHhqwBwmRkI
- stevage 3y ago
- stewartjarod 3y agowhen mmo?
- charliebwrites 3y agoIs anyone keeping track of the layoffs that have happened so far? Seems like there’s been quite a few lately, would be cool to see them all in one place, tracked over time
- pnine 3y agohttps://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
- Madmallard 3y agoCorporate greed? Unfortunately game companies often don’t recover as well from layoffs due to the completely unpredictable nature as to whether a game will be a success. Maybe Riot learned the hard way that you can’t just throw talent at a genre and expect to continue massive growth?
- 1B05H1N 3y agoDidn't make enough money off skins this year I guess. Good luck to those impacted.
- 99catmaster 3y agoIs their Vanguard anti cheat still a root kit?
- bobobob420 3y agoYup and i cant even have virtualization enabled to use docker or I cant play Valorant. I have to constantly toggle and reboot system.
- stevage 3y ago> This isn’t to appease shareholders or to hit a quarterly earnings number—it’s a necessity. They don't seem to explain in any way why it's a necessity.
- mdorazio 3y agoI read that as they have negative cash flow and need to fix it ASAP.
- jachee 3y ago…in order to appease shareholders and/or hit earnings numbers, right?
- kyrra 3y agoOne possible reason is due to Section 174 tax issues. See: https://www.axios.com/2024/01/20/taxes-irs-startups-section174 https://www.axios.com/2024/01/20/taxes-irs-startups-section1...
- gamblor956 3y agoGiven that the layoffs are hitting artists and content developers more heavily than the programmers, it is unlikely that Section 174 is the motivation for these layoffs.
- Spellman 3y agoSimilarly. And why is that bad? Because once you run out of money everything is cooked
- stevage 3y agoIf that's true, then this is the weaseliest way to express that: > The adjustments we're making aim to focus us on the areas that have the greatest impact on your experience while reducing investment on things that don’t.
- 3y ago
- bogomipz 3y agoWas this Tencent's decision then since they own Riot? Tencent seems to be facing some headwinds. See: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/22/tencent-netease-shares-plummet-on-new-china-online-gaming-guidelines.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/22/tencent-netease-shares-plumm...
- uudecoded 3y agoHas anyone noticed that there are now 78 comments on this post and no Rioters checking in? Have I missed something? On any HN corporate layoff post, we should expect some volume of named company FTEs or impacted folks commenting. There seems to be a pattern here that has been ebbing and flowing over the last few years. Should this be a titled phenomenon/effect? I see at least 3 options here: 1) Named company employees do not read/post on HN (if true, is this HN content? divergent topic...) 2) Named company employees are coerced or otherwise compensated to not comment on these matters, even if they do not directly impact them 3) Named company employees do not care about this n% layoff and are withholding comment edit: formatting
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- silisili 3y agoI always assumed, perhaps naively, that gamedev folks skewed younger on the whole due to work life balance and burnout, whereas this site skews a bit older. Maybe just a demographic mismatch?
- coffeebeqn 3y agoMost software engineers I know in games go to HN. I used to work in games and always read it
- whateveracct 3y ago(2) feels most likely - there's probably something in the severance package about it. I know I've seen that before.
- goalonetwo 3y agoWhat are the chances that a company figures out which employee is posting on HN? Especially if they use a throwaway as is usually the case?
- biotopia 3y ago
- danielodievich 3y agoMeanwhile, their Seattle area office that they purchased for $114M in 2021 https://www.mi-reporter.com/news/riot-games-stands-in-the-permitting-stages-of-building-process-on-mercer-island/ https://www.mi-reporter.com/news/riot-games-stands-in-the-pe... to put in ~400 people is almost done https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/riot-seattle-office-design-mercer https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/riot-seattle-office-design... and from what I can see through the windows, it's looking really nice.
- BlackjackCF 3y agoI’m surprised that they decided to move forward with the project in 2021 due to COVID. Were they just too far in with contracts at that point to duck out?
- Zetobal 3y agoIt's office space literally everyone dipped into that pool of free money.
- AlbertCory 3y agoQuick translation for those too busy to read it all: We're going to do lots of fantastic things. Not with you, though.
- bob1029 3y ago> Our strategy will more tightly integrate esports, music, and entertainment with our games. Esports isn't just about competition; it's about the highs, the lows, and the communities that flourish around the games. From my perspective, Riot Games began a course for the rocks the moment they started chasing esports and "meta". Imagine developing a game where you apply punitive actions to players for selecting game play paths you openly allowed them to pick. "Oops! you're having fun slightly wrong so enjoy this ban". I could get over some of this in support of high stakes gameplay objectives, but if it's all the time at every level it's like a cancer. The exact moment I stopped playing League of Legends was the day they released the patch that said we could no longer stack items. I felt the fun go away like a light switch being flipped off. I am done with consuming games as of 2024. I used to game more than I worked not too long ago. The MBAs and related types have completely sucked the fun out of the room. I feel for the developers and artists who will be job hunting this year. Their leaders have failed them on many levels and over such a long period of time. LoL was the game to play for a solid decade and there isn't any obvious reason it couldn't have continued for another. Blizzard and Overwatch are a carbon copy of this if you need one. In this case, the original game didn't even survive. They had to increment the integer and completely kill & bury the original title to justify their insanity to investors. The only viable path I can see at this point is to start a game studio from the ground up and avoid all external capital by burning gigantic piles of my own cash. Fun at all costs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- happytiger 3y agoI love how douche baggie all these letters are. They always describe canning people as “change that brings opportunities.”