Riot Games Lays Off 530 Employees Including Senior Developers And Game Designers

The hits just keep coming as another big video game company announces its own round of layoffs. Riot Games announced earlier this week that it was cutting 11% of its workforce, affecting a whopping 530 employees, most of whom reportedly work outside of the core development teams. The growing list of affected developers on Reddit begs to differ though, showing several producers, lead developers, game designers, and artists being given their pink slips.

The layoffs come as part of Riot’s efforts to sharpen their focus and prioritize their core titles, including Valorant, League of Legends, Wild Rift, and Teamfight Tactics. Its esports leagues will also remain one of the studio’s top priorities.

“Since 2019, we’ve made a number of big bets across the company with the goal of making it better to be a player,” reads the official memo from CEO Dylan Jadeja. “We jumped headfirst into creating new experiences and broadening our portfolio, and grew quickly as we became a multi-game, multi-experience company — expanding our global footprint, changing our operating model, bringing in new talent to match our ambitions, and ultimately doubling the size of Riot in just a few years.”

“Today, we’re a company without a sharp enough focus, and simply put, we have too many things underway,” he continued. “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.”

Legends of Runeterra has been hit particularly hard by the layoffs as Riot begins downsizing the team to focus on its Path of Champions single-player roguelike mode. “Starting today and continuing over the next few months, we will begin the process of reducing the size and scope of LoR to a team that is focused on sustainably making the game you love,” game director and executive producer Dave Guskin announced in a separate memo.

“We’ve invested a lot of time and resources into LoR to give the team as much runway as possible in an attempt to make the business work - and the truth is, we haven’t been able to do that,” he added.

It doesn’t look like the upcoming League of Legends MMORPG has been affected though as its still included in Riot’s list of in-development titles. It does, however, come at the expense of the Riot Forge developer partnership program headed by Greg Street.

“While we’re proud of what we’ve created in this space, and we’re grateful for the Forge team and for our external partners who made these games happen, we don’t view this as core to our strategy moving forward,” Jadeja said. “We aren’t closing the door entirely on single-player experiences or working with other developers if the right project comes along, but we would want it to look pretty different in the future.”

Riot Games will be hosting a Riot Now developer stream in February to talk about upcoming games and their general plans for 2024 in light of its ongoing restructuring.