Draugoth
Gold Member
An Important Update about Riot’s Future
The following is a copy of the internal message from our CEO.
www.riotgames.com
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Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Riot’s is terminatingabout 530 employees globally (around 10% of workforce)
www.riotgames.com
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
Not a good time to work in the gaming industry.
DaciaJC
Gold Member
Yeah, seems like layoffs of this scale have become a regular headline. Hope they land on their feet.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
I like how just about every industry having layoffs just do it.
But in gaming, there's always this weird social media PR of "We're doing layoffs, but will publicly announce it first so employees dont leak memos. Please keep buying our stuff as we want to make sure all of you continue to be our customer and best buddies"
Certainly not
Games industry leaders braced 'for up to two years of pain'
Games industry bosses thing 2024 will be 'the year of closures'
www.gamesindustry.biz
ChorizoPicozo
Member
pandemic bubble still?
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Totally IMO.
Covid was at home splurging buying stuff and gaming and binge watching Netflix.
Post Covid, it's back to normal life but more importantly interest and mortgage rates that are probably triple what they were during Covid. People would rather spend their time on money on other stuff and paying bills.
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It's also down to these companies hiring like mad the past 5 years. Interest rates were nothing so getting investment to expand was easy. Now the money is tighter and everyone realized its better to have half the staff and know what's actually going on.
These 'mass layoffs' are not due to things getting tough, they're due to the free money gravy train drying up, it's just a correction vs a crash.
Edit: In 2018 they had 2500 people. Increased by nearly 100% in 5 years. 10% is a pretty minor correction.
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FeralEcho
Member
Sorry to say this, I hope all those affected land on their feet but most of these companies have grown too fat with little work being done so it's not a surprise to see these companies unload all this fat.
Let's see,devs work less than 40 hours a week nowadays per studies so no crunch like previous generations,mostly from home unlike previous generations,with higher budgets than previous generations,better tools than previous generations,with 4 times the workforce than previous generations(in most big companies) yet they need a minimum of 5 years to churn out one game that's a messy broken launch product that needs 10 patches to even become a functioning product,while in the previous generations we'd get 3 games(that are functioning at launch)in the same timeframe somehow with worse tools,worse working conditions,and less people....Something doesn't add up and I'm guessing is people are too comfortable at work and don't work anywhere near their best capacity...
Let's see,devs work less than 40 hours a week nowadays per studies so no crunch like previous generations,mostly from home unlike previous generations,with higher budgets than previous generations,better tools than previous generations,with 4 times the workforce than previous generations(in most big companies) yet they need a minimum of 5 years to churn out one game that's a messy broken launch product that needs 10 patches to even become a functioning product,while in the previous generations we'd get 3 games(that are functioning at launch)in the same timeframe somehow with worse tools,worse working conditions,and less people....Something doesn't add up and I'm guessing is people are too comfortable at work and don't work anywhere near their best capacity...
kruis
Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
It's not a good time to work in the IT industry period. It seems like every US IT company is dumping 10-15% of its work force: Google, Amazon, Tiktok, Broadcom, Cisco, Oracle, Red Hat, Meta, Qualcomm, Nokia, Unity, Epic Games, Microsoft, Bungie, Bioware, etc etc etc.
Video game company layoffs are creating an industry crisis
Video game companies have laid off thousands of workers this year
www.polygon.com
A comprehensive list of 2023 & 2024 tech layoffs | TechCrunch
A complete list of all the known layoffs in tech, from Big Tech to startups, broken down by month throughout 2023 and 2024.
techcrunch.com
ChuckeRearmed
Member
Damn, the riot is big.
DenchDeckard
Moderated wildly
The bubble has burst. 
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
IRS is also trying to get a lot of extra money: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
Bad time to be a startup or a company not the size of Google…
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Exactly.
I cant speak for head office as I work in a regional office with around 150-200 people. But at my non-gaming company, I think weve expanded headcount about 10% the past 5 years and weve grown sales since 2018. Compared to peak covid sales in 2020 were finally surpassing that in 2024. From 2021-2023 were basically flat compared to gigantic sales in 2020 and that's even with some price increases and all we could do is get to flat.
Increasing headcount 100% is absurd. No wonder they are chopping people (about 20% of the 2,500 100% increase). Other companies who shot up in sales during Covid (like mine) arent increasing headcount 50% or 100% because it's not sensible. And everyone knew that when things go back to normal, sales arent going to keep rocketing up. The at home hoarding and binging product sales will slow down and all the products nailed by people at home will rebound.
However, with tech companies it's easy as it's a digital kind of job. Half the people probably dont even work at a regional or head office so hiring and firing is easy to do. And scaling up or down is simply adding an extra employee with a corporate laptop. Easy to scale up. Easy to scale down. It's also an industry that seems to be flush with corporate coffers where no budget, spending habit or hiring spree is ever too big to reconsider. You can tell with their super expensive offices and perks the wallets are loose day one. Earn $1 of revenue, but spend $2 in hopes the roller coaster sales come in down the line to save everyone.
The only other industry that has wild spending habits are biotech companies or mining companies in early stages as they are just starting and need time to ramped up production. And for pharma kinds of companies you dont get sales unless a drug is approved and that can take 10 years. But no other kind of companies except tech do you have wild swings in employee count and spending in established companies like it's rolling dice at a craps table.
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systemr123
Member
An Important Update about Riot’s Future
The following is a copy of the internal message from our CEO.
The atmosphere at the office will be a riot
YOU PC BRO?!
Member
There’s no reason whatsoever a company like Riot needs over 5000 employees. This is the same over staffing problem twitter had when musk took over. Probably 80% of the staff there do very little, achieve less and are a net burden on the business. I wonder what percentage of employees at Riot are actual developers?
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Check out Embracer's wiki page on acquisitions history. The amount of studios and money they spent during those low rate covid years is insane. Most of their big buck acquisitions were during covid. And once the rates really jacked up it all came to a stop. Suddenly they havent bought any studios in a full year.
nush
Member
True, it's been like this for every company I've worked for that had layoffs. People think they are safe if they survive the first wave. I tell them they are not and should start looking for a new job right away.
Oh, that was Riot games,
Hopefully it's the DEI hires out the door.
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SCB3
Member
Not just the US, I'm lucky that in the UK it seems to have slowed down now, but there wasa few sketchy months, I lukced out by not only getting out of the gaming industry but moving into Science/Medical Tech which seems to be unaffected at all outside of low China salesIt's not a good time to work in the IT industry period. It seems like every US IT company is dumping 10-15% of its work force: Google, Amazon, Tiktok, Broadcom, Cisco, Oracle, Red Hat, Meta, Qualcomm, Nokia, Unity, Epic Games, Microsoft, Bungie, Bioware, etc etc etc.
Video game company layoffs are creating an industry crisis
Video game companies have laid off thousands of workers this year
A comprehensive list of 2023 & 2024 tech layoffs | TechCrunch
A complete list of all the known layoffs in tech, from Big Tech to startups, broken down by month throughout 2023 and 2024.
wipeout364
Member
It’s great they are spending on R and D for stuff outside League, they should be applauded for that. Valorant and their Netflix series seems to have paid off but their other games seemed to have bombed so I am not surprised they are taking a step back to focus on their core games for a little while.
There's also the fact that they were only buying to increase their valuation to secure investment - an investment which they needed to maintain all the studios they were buying, which they felt they'd only get by presenting themselves as a massive entity. It was a stupid prymaid scheme play.
They were doing the corporate equivalent of taking out credit cards to make over-leveraged bets on options in the stock market. But they were paying 2% on the CC's because the interest rate was so low, so they decided it was worth the risk. Can you imagine if credit card interest rates dropped to 2%, how much collective debt the entire population would take on? That's essentially what happened to tech companies.
The over-expansion is a way to avoid tax too - re-invest every dollar and vaporize profits for the sake of growth. thats what that tax bill is trying to address, it's been a loophole for too long.
Plus the drain on management and the people who made the company successful when you expand like that is far too real. Creative studios cannot infinitely scale, it has to be done much, much more slowly.
And I totally agree on your other point - the company i'm at chose a similar path through. Mid covid we had the opportunity to hire like mad and take on a bunch of work in the Middle East. We chose not to, to stay lean, not hire, and if people quit, we wouldn't replace them. We actually shrank a little - but now our competitors are in second rounds of layoffs, closing entire offices, and we're doing projections and putting money aside for payrises and bonuses at the end of this year.
But yeah, any conversation about a company doing a layoff is meaningless unless you also look at their previous 5 years of headcount.
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