From The Verge: After last year saw over 9,000 layoffs in the video game industry, 2024 is continuing the trend, and League of Legends maker Riot Games is the latest example. On Monday night, the company announced that “we are refocusing on fewer, high-impact projects to move us toward a more sustainable future,” which means eliminating roles for 530 people globally, or about 11 percent of its total workforce.
This news arrives just days after the results of a Game Developers Conference (GDC) survey showed 56 percent of respondents felt layoffs were in store for their studios due in large part to a “post-pandemic course correction.”
“Some of the significant investments we’ve made aren’t paying off the way we expected them to,” said CEO Dylan Jadeja said in a company-wide message, referring to Riot’s 10th-anniversary expansions in 2019 that spread the League of Legends universe across new games and other forms of entertainment. For employees “whose role is or may be impacted,” there will be a meeting with their relevant leads within the next 48 hours, and a minimum of six months of severance pay offered, with more for those who had been with the company longer, as well as other benefits.
What Riot says it’s prioritizing is the core live games it makes, like League of Legends, Valorant, Teamfight Tactics, and Wild Rift, as well as esports and events tied to those titles. Similarly, the still-in-development Project L 2D fighting game with League characters is said to be “making great progress,” and season two of its Arcane TV show for Netflix is on track to come out in November.
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