Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead
riotgames.com
riotgames.com
It appears to be very heavily biased toward artists, so even if they start that job hunt today, it’s still going to be frantic.
Despite unemployment being low, the reality is that many of those “thousands of positions” are either geographically-distributed duplicates of the same position, eternally-open cattle calls, or open-but-basically-a-formality for either getting a visa or an internal move. This makes the number of actual openings quite opaque, yet much smaller than it appears.
Of course I could simply be unlucky and swamped by other more attractive candidates. Apparently seniors are swamping Junior roles, so maybe I'm just competing with a bunch of staff/principals now in mid/senior roles.
Or did we all fall for the lifestyle inflation trap that comes with high salaries?
I'm probably a pessimist/realist but I have always lived way below my income and saved as much as possible because it really feels like the cash cow that software engineering is is eventually going to end. Layoffs are always looming. When that day comes, I want to relax as much as possible and not have a deadline to find a job,
I could afford to take months or years off, but I’d rather let that money grow in an interest-bearing account for decades and spend it later.
I'd much rather resort to temp work than dig deeply into my future if I had a choice.
If I could help it I'd rather invest in
They probably eat cheaper food? We do a lot of fruits and veggies. But not organic. Eating out is too expensive, we don't do that.
Also, I live in Southern California, it might be cheaper where you are.
2. I'm married and I have two kids. It's amazing how fast multiple years of saving disappear when you have daycare.
Just to give you an idea of what childcare looks like: It's a very reasonable question whether we should pay for childcare, or hire a full-time staff member for the household to watch the kids: The price is about the same.
I guess it is a trade-off. We could live slightly better in a bigger house but I don't want to stress and be in a tough spot if one of us lose their job. That mental sanity is worth 30% of our income to me.
Peace of mind for the cost of "only" making 4.65% interest is well worth it to me.
I feel bad for all these layoffs, but it seems the support system has improved drastically since then.
So much negativity around these statistical outliers. The majority of companies in the US don't offer severance and it's very rare in some industries. Not saying that it's fair, but name and shame? Maybe we're living in different worlds.
Is it too prying to ask what that means in terms of your outcome? Idk what the WARN act is, and I understand that my question may be neive or too personal to post an answer to publicly, but I'm curious what the alternative to signing is/was and if the answer is generally applicable or specific to the company/agreement.
The WARN Act[1] is a bit of federal legislation that applies during mass layoffs. There are some variations from state to state, but it generally ensures anyone caught in a mass layoff (50 to 100+ people) is required to receive either 2-months advance notice or 2-months salary+medical benefits.
When Shopify performed their layoffs, there were subject to WARN payouts as they did not furnish 2-months notice.
The severance agreement they gave me and others paid out an additional 8 weeks + 1 week per year of seniority, contingent on signing.
I declined to sign, which was painful, but my main concerns were over two clauses:
* a non-mutual NDA Shopify was unwilling to change to a mutual NDA.
* a provision to appear in court on Shopify’s behalf, uncompensated, for an indeterminate about of time, whenever requested.
There was a lot of other oddness about that whole layoff I’ll leave out here for the sake of brevity, but the whole process was quite the shitshow.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...
https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/redundancy-pay
To quote:
"half a week’s pay for each full year you were under 22
one week’s pay for each full year you were 22 or older, but under 41
one and half week’s pay for each full year you were 41 or older
Length of service is capped at 20 years."
And also it's pretty shit because it's capped, so for most software devs it won't be anywhere near what their actual salary was:
"If you were made redundant on or after 6 April 2023, your weekly pay is capped at £643 and the maximum statutory redundancy pay you can get is £19,290. "
For example, if you happen to be classed as a "worker", rather than an employee, you do not have a legal right to leave work or take time off to care for a sick family member or pick a child up from school.
Redundancy also comes with a required notice period that the employer must pay you through as well. And there’s a bunch of other rules around how people can be selected for redundancy.
I got laid off when Realtime Worlds went into administration and only got the statutory pay until years later the company was wound up and I got a follow on measly cheque from them for part the money they still owed me for the notice period.
Nope, that money is entirely paid by the employer.
https://www.springhouselaw.com/knowledge-hub/redundancy/who-...
"Your redundancy pay is called a statutory redundancy payment. It is calculated based on your age, weekly pay and number of years you’ve worked for your employer. You are also entitled to a paid minimum statutory Notice Period. It’s your employer’s duty to pay these, but your payments are capped"
Likewise the notice period is paid at full rate.
PS: not saying you shouldn't have gotten a better severance package.
So ... fraud? Probably nets you up to six months in prison?
Unfortunately, tons of people in the world really don't care about wrong, they only care about what they can get away with? Their argument was "I paid the unemployment tax, I should be able to take advantage of the benefit". But I agree, the point is not to use as much as possible. It's to use as little as possible. We can't have nice things because lots of people will abuse the system.
Most are fairly high cost living locations outside the US (ex: Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Paris, Dubai). Mumbai and Sao Paulo are not cheap for India and Brazil.
In the last year Riot also started to sell severely overpriced skins, despite a lot of outrage from the community. With their lootbox system you basically only guaranteed certain skins if you spent like $200, which many players complained was inaccessible for them. Maybe this was a sign that financials were not in a great place for the company.
No comment on the other aspects but I suspect they are still printing money (comparing to Fortnite and Valve)
First watch the 2022 cinematic [0], to get an idea of what they normally ship. Then watch the 2023 cinematic [1], to see how badly they messed up. And just to drive the point home, compare it with the 2024 cinematic [2] which is a return to form.
If you look at the 2023 cinematic in a vacuum it might seem generic and uninspired, but then when you compare it with the 2022 and 2024 cinematics the quality gap becomes apparent.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDYqT0_9VR4
Likely came together last minute and their preferred vendors weren’t available.
They learned from Valorant. It has extremely overpriced skins from the beginning too, and the outrage lasts a single post on Reddit once every few months and is downvoted by fanboys. They just don't care, people will buy them anyway, most people will forget in a moment. I'm guessing they have data from Valorant that simply shows they make more if they just aim at whales. I doubt they would just raise prices without giving it a real thought.
I'm sure there is a kid somewhere crying into his controller because he's been rejected by his online friends because he's using the default skin, but I think he's learning a valuable life lesson.
The comment I was replying to didn't say they weren't selling, just that they were unaffordable to many people, so I don't really know what you're referring to.
Maybe it's a negative to alienate your customers in this way, or maybe it works financially to make skins just out of reach and 'aspirational' for most gamers.
> This means we’re eliminating about 530 roles globally, which represents around 11% of Rioters, with the biggest impact to teams outside of core development.
They don't seem to explain in any way why it's a necessity.
And why is that bad? Because once you run out of money everything is cooked
> The adjustments we're making aim to focus us on the areas that have the greatest impact on your experience while reducing investment on things that don’t.
I just can’t imagine they’re cash flow negative given how popular League and Valorant are, but maybe they’re seeing enough of a dip in their numbers that they’re trending in that direction.
esports does not bring in new players, it mostly brings back churned players or excites current players. The financial model for existing players versus new players is very different.
When you look at some of the sponsorship conversations over the past couple of years it makes sense why they needed to make some of the bets (https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/29/21347587/riot-games-saudi-...).
So you layoff 10% to save the other 90%.
Because otherwise you’d have put 100% of your company out of a job + knock on effects to local economy, being sued, prosecuted for all sorts of things etc etc
We know it has somebody with a foot fetish. Look at the footwear of all the female characters (at least the ones made before 2016, I haven't played it since then).
I did try to watch some recent games and while it looks like the gameplay itself has improved since then, the effect visuals have somehow managed to get even more blended and difficult to read. How do they manage to fail this badly at it for so long?
ehh?? On the character models or splash arts? I've played for a long time and have never heard anyone else say this, outside of the French Maid Nidalee skin[0] which is obvious foot fetish bait. The most notable foot-related art commentary was always around "pizza feet" which was the low-poly, pizza-shaped feet of the character models.
[0] https://lol.fandom.com/wiki/French_Maid_Nidalee ... moderately nsfw?
Splash arts generally. Almost every single one is wearing heels. Once you notice it you can't stop seeing it.
This is the first time I hear of liking heels as having a foot fetish.
Also wtf WikiFeet.
Were they just too far in with contracts at that point to duck out?
I smell BS
Another less talked about point is GaaS. Many, many studios were trying to ramp up games with continuous revenue streams, and that needs a big investment and risk. It's not ubcommon to launch 10 GaaS expecting 7 to fail and 1 to easily pay for the other 9's developments. That's a great strategy with free money. Awful when you need to weather a storm. And now we're on that storm. Even studios with successful GaaS have to reel back, so most games in development are SoL.
So, not surprising but the volume this year is immense.
It's very convenient that this isn't measurable and if you asked anyone in the industry at the time they most likely would have said "We don't have nearly enough" people.
Neither are true. They took a gamble with low risk and the low risk became normal risk. Layoffs often come with a small stock rise, so they aren't even shamed by shareholders for trimming down. It's devastating for employee morale but that's rarely a factor in these decisions.
Ancillary service workers always get hit badly, but good salespersons are often safer than good engineers.
However, good salespeople can make a lot of money.
Sales, marketing, HR, admins, PMs, etc. are usually the first to go because they don't "keep the lights on" and it's hard to measure their impact.
While it's true that it's also hard to measure a single engineer's impact, it's scarier to fire someone who may be expensive to replace and who may take institutional knowledge of the inner workings of the product with them.
Also, top-down layoffs tend to target expensive staff with large paychecks, without accounting for institutional knowledge or intangible value delivered.
would it? maybe you are talking about video games and a good enough game would sell itself. But for other businesses sales / marketing / ads do matter. Imagine you provide a 50% better service than your competitors, but you target audience never reaches your page because they are bombarded with google ads of your competitors
If you generate the same number of leads, do you need 300 salespeople to convert them? Or could your top 100 performers do it? Do you need separate salespeople for each product or can one person sell it all?
At the trough of interest rates, big companies had insane numbers of salespeople touching each deal (easily 10+ at some orgs) because they'd over-hired and the forced people to hyper-specialize to justify it.
We're going to do lots of fantastic things. Not with you, though.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/22/tencent-netease-shares-plumm...
Seems like there’s been quite a few lately, would be cool to see them all in one place, tracked over time
On any HN corporate layoff post, we should expect some volume of named company FTEs or impacted folks commenting. There seems to be a pattern here that has been ebbing and flowing over the last few years.
Should this be a titled phenomenon/effect? I see at least 3 options here:
1) Named company employees do not read/post on HN (if true, is this HN content? divergent topic...)
2) Named company employees are coerced or otherwise compensated to not comment on these matters, even if they do not directly impact them
3) Named company employees do not care about this n% layoff and are withholding comment
edit: formatting
It's doubtful that these Chinese employees are chatting about it on hacker news, since it would draw attention of the authorities. Also, there is a trend for Chinese companies to not hire workers that are over 35 years old, so most of these employees are probably in shock on how they would pay their mortgages and support their parents at the same time. And Chinese economy is in the crapper right now.
Tencent is doing pretty horrible as well. Tencent Leads $80 Billion Rout as China Rekindles Crackdown Fear https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tencent-plunges-china-unveils...
From my perspective, Riot Games began a course for the rocks the moment they started chasing esports and "meta". Imagine developing a game where you apply punitive actions to players for selecting game play paths you openly allowed them to pick. "Oops! you're having fun slightly wrong so enjoy this ban". I could get over some of this in support of high stakes gameplay objectives, but if it's all the time at every level it's like a cancer. The exact moment I stopped playing League of Legends was the day they released the patch that said we could no longer stack items. I felt the fun go away like a light switch being flipped off.
I am done with consuming games as of 2024. I used to game more than I worked not too long ago. The MBAs and related types have completely sucked the fun out of the room. I feel for the developers and artists who will be job hunting this year. Their leaders have failed them on many levels and over such a long period of time. LoL was the game to play for a solid decade and there isn't any obvious reason it couldn't have continued for another.
Blizzard and Overwatch are a carbon copy of this if you need one. In this case, the original game didn't even survive. They had to increment the integer and completely kill & bury the original title to justify their insanity to investors. The only viable path I can see at this point is to start a game studio from the ground up and avoid all external capital by burning gigantic piles of my own cash. Fun at all costs.
Then there is the higher interest rates, which in themselves are an issue for the economy. Not so much because companies “need” to borrow money as such, but because the ridiculously low interest rates made it easier to make more money since you could fund things with money you didn’t have, since it was basically free to do so. A lot of places even sort of dropped the ball on this, not locking in the rates on their loans because, well, because we’re collectively rather stupid, so many organisations are looking at making deals with banks to find some reasonable place to land these loans in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone too bad.
There is more to it than that, but the over all result is that a long with the inflation (which may have stopped but it’s not like prices are dropping just because they paused increasing) wage stagnation and so on, is that there is a lot less purchasing power and willingness both in the investment and in the consumer markets.
You can say that companies over hires during the COVID lock downs, which isn’t really wrong, but we’re also sort of in a recession that we have collective agree not to talk about. Partly because it’s a weird recession considering the job market is hot.
Tencent has lost a lot of value in the past few months and has had a terrible year overall. The value has disappeared.
> I think it’s a concept invented to facilitate wealth transfers.
Well, if you transfer a bunch of wealth upwards, it's going to have negative consequences that travel downwards. Those who receive them may describe the economy as "bad." Which not only describes a current state, but probably mostly encodes their lack of hope for any type of future mobility that may change their circumstances.
However, according to their Q3 filings (Q4 has not been filed yet), their video game revenue is actually up and they specifically cite the performance of Valorant.
So the issue for Tencent wasn't Riot Games, it was its Chinese developers.
Their total value loss has occurred solidly throughout 2023. No part of the year was particularly good for them, and the regulator news doesn't seem to have had any unique impact, at least looking at their OTC chart.
The net result is that we’re around 2000 fewer people than we planned to be in 2025. Again, not that we aren’t generating money, because we’re still on black books, but far, far, less than what we wanted and it’s not likely to change in the foreseeable future.
One of the major reasons the job market is still doing just fine is because the larger generations are being replaced by much smaller generations, so there are simply fewer workers in the total pool. If there weren’t things wouldn’t look this bright.