TLDR: Riot is downscaling. The severance package is great but it’s another round of layoffs in the industry.
This will also majorly affect Legends of Runeterra. They’re putting the game on life support it seems, and will focus on the PvE mode.
They’re also shutting down Riot Forge, their collaboration with other studios to make smaller games with their IP.
Riot is a trash company.
I feel for the employees who lost their jobs.
Its always grating when CEOs say they “take responsibility” but they’re not taking a demotion and paycut. No, somehow, the idiots who made the shitty decisions get to keep making them. Apparently that’s “responsibility.”
I was laid off from my small warehouse job because the company wasn’t making enough money. The next month my boss took his family on an African safari. Eat the rich.
These layoffs are always for shareholders as share prices go up when the layoffs happen. It’s not about cash flow. It’s purely about shareholders.
Share prices go up always affects c suite the most. They get better returns on the shares they own and also get large bonuses. Far from take responsibility, a ceo massively profits from layoffs.
I don’t think there will ever be any CEO that takes a pay cut over doing layoffs.
Satoru Iwata and the Wii U is the single instance I can think of.
I remember reading in 2020 the CEOs of Toyota and Columbia sportswear both reduced their salary so they wouldn’t immediately have to lay people off like most companies were doing.
Iirc the Nintendo cceos did so they wouldn’t have to fire people a handful of years ago. Not sure how often that happens though.
I don’t really think riot is trash. But I don’t follow the media around gaming that much. Their layoff plan seems extremely generous and caring considering other bullshit I’ve seen. It sounds like they care about people - so it’s good pr at least .
https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-games-1828165483
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/27/riot-discrimination-100-million-settlement/
When your culture of sexism results in a class action lawsuit from former and current employees, and you pay out to the tune of 100 million and keep all the same executives who were accused of harassment and discrimination, and you have to have a third party watch over your company for years to make sure you’re not still doing this stuff: you’re a trash company.
I couldn’t roll my eyes any harder. That’s literally all it is.
Then I’ll amend and say yeah that’s trash - but trash or not, I’ll still say it’s a very decent severance package… But still trash company, agree.
Literally the very first thing Riot did was steal and intentionally attempt to sabotage a beloved free game cause they were greedy and wanted all the money.
It’s just a shame it worked.
Yeah, seems fucky, like I said - having read the articles the other poster provided - I agree they are shit.
I never heard about that
Pendragon used to maintain Dota, when he passed it over to IceFrog he (for some reason) kept control over the Dota website (you used to have to go to the website and download the Dota map everytime it updated), so it was pretty important, as well as the forum community.
When Pendragon decided to start Riot and LoL, instead of just giving the website to IceFrog he took the site offline and replaced it with a redirect advert for LoL.
The forums were also taken offline where he went into the data and stole a whole bunch of hero designs that were suggested and under discussion.
Overall a dick move, and what a way to introduce your new company and game to millions of people.
Even though I don’t play Dota anymore, I’m very pleased that both Riot and Blizzard failed to seize the copyrights to Dota from Valve.
Damn. That’s fucked up. Thanks for the rundown.
It’s pretty generous, but maybe the CEO could just take a pay cut
I don’t. They got exactly what they deserved.
Care to elaborate? It sounds like you’re cheering for folks, who have little to no control over how the company operates, loosing their way of making a living.
To put it another way, the leopards ate their face.
They chose to work for a scummy company, probably because they’re greedy too.
I disagree. In a society where people need to work to support themselves working for Riot is not beyond the pale. If we had a UBI, universal jobs program, or a plethora of cooperative enterprises I’d agree.