Video game developer Riot Games has laid off 530 of its employees, amounting to 11% of its total workforce.
The news was revealed to employees through an email from Riot’s chief executive Dylan Jadeja, among other announcements including the company reducing its focus on the League of Legends-based card game Legends of Runeterra in favor of the Path of Champions PvE mode.
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Riot is also ending Riot Forge, the program it launched in 2019 to make single-player League of Legends games with external studios.
Jadeja said: “We’re changing some of the bets we’ve made and shifting how we work across the company to create focus and move us toward a more sustainable future.
“Since 2019, we’ve made a number of big bets across the company. 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.
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“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.
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By GlobalData“Our costs have grown to the point where they’re unsustainable, and we’ve left ourselves with no room for experimentation or failure. All of this puts the core of our business at risk.
“Over the past several months, we’ve tried to alter our trajectory in many different ways. We asked leaders to make tradeoffs in the things their teams are working on. We rolled out hiring slowdowns, and in some cases hiring freezes. We put an emphasis on controlling costs while strengthening our revenue growth.
“It’s become clear to all of us that these changes aren’t enough. We have to do more to focus our business and center our efforts on the things that drive the most player value. Unfortunately, this involves making changes in the area where we invest the most, our headcount.
“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 move comes after Riot Games announced a remote-broadcast production partnership with Gravity Media, the UK-based provider of live broadcast facilities and production services last year.
Under that deal, Gravity provides managed services first at the remote broadcast center Riot Games operates in Dublin, Ireland. These services cover remote production support at all Riot Games’ esports events and tournaments.
