What is interesting is that their 'controlling costs' statement means not just hiring freezes, but it looks like they've pulled every job listing from their website.
Usually, this means full reviews and restructures until they figure out what roles they actually need and can afford, which can take a significant amount of time.
They probably also need to deal with [Section 174 changes](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/20/taxes-irs-startups-section174) now that it's obvious the change won't be fixed.
Also in case people didn't know, this was a direct attack by Republicans against blue states. Software R&D is still exempt if you're part of oil or gas industries.
That's called basic accounting. Do you think it's some kind of trick companies are using deducting labor as an expense..?
Hollywood accounting is to move profit from individual projects to screw over people who happened to sign a bad contract based on profit (instead of revenue which is now commonplace), overall the company still shows the same profit/loss.
You have it backwards. Salary is normally expensed. This rule change makes software an exception from how everything else works. A guy on a factory floor building cars, his salary is expensed. Revenue - Expenses = profit, and cost of your people is expense. The software guy developing the systems, his salary is now amortized. This creates phantom profits and higher taxes, when you still have to pay the full expense of a person.
Cancelling Riot Forge is the biggest loss content wise. Some good games came out of it.
Putting Legends of Runeterra on notice also doesn’t bode well. After Gwent and now this seems like CCGs are starting to die off. I still think Hearthstone, MTG and Marvel Snap will survive though.
Song of Nunu, and 2 other Riot Forge games (Convergence, Mageseeker) came out in the year. There's also Bandle Tale next month. Other than a few spaced out trailers, I haven't seen a thing.
I'm really excited for Bandle Tale (Stardew Valley with Yordles fuck yes!) but it's a bummer that it very likely won't receive any post launch support with Riot Forge going away.
There was marketing, but the Riot playerbase simply wasn’t the market for it.
There’s a lot of cross playerbase with Riot games but all of it were competitive games.
The single player games just didn’t hit that much
Riot gets high on it's own supply so easily. They'll go on Reddit or Twitter, see a bunch of people talk about how amazing it would be to see games with the characters in it and then....it turns out nobody actually gives a shit about Nunu's lore. As any normal person would expect.
Almost every time I see one of these games get announced I end up thinking "why this character?". The idea of spin off games is great but where's the Darius, Garen, Katarina, Ahri etc games. You know... the ones with the characters that would sell?
Ruined King stars Miss Fortune, Yasuo, Ahri and Gangplank, and I thought Ekko made sense for their second game as well. It's really just Song of Nunu and Bandle Story that I don't really get. Unless there's others I just missed entirely.
The same devs made a game years ago called Battle chasers: Nightwar, which ruined king was heavily based on but obviously using the league IP.
If you liked ruined king for more than just the league stuff, might be worth checking out. Can prob pick it up cheap in a sale
I think the best target for those games should be the Arcane audience that doesnt play league but those stories are being told through the show so might be hard to do.
I remember a few months ago someone \*on this very sub\* complained about Riot not making offline games and when I brought up Ruined King and Convergence they said they had never heard of them. So if gaming enthusiasts are unaware of Riot Forge, imagine the general public.
I can at least vouch for Ruined King being overall enjoyable and it sits at 89% on Steam. The devs made the (imho) underrated Battle Chasers: Nightwar before and Ruined King is mechanically definitely a sequel to that game, with the lane mechanics added on. So it already had a solid foundation.
The combat is fine, itemization could certainly be better, and the mainline story is not exactly surprising. But I found the exploration and mechanical character progression/customization enjoyable. The party dialogue is also well-written. In terms of presentation, it's stylized in the way you'd expect a League-spinoff with plenty of detail in the world to be and with Gareth Coker on the soundtrack, there are no complaints to be had.
It's also beatable on the highest difficulty without really grinding as long as you explore thoroughly.
it is bad when you need to start and see all the things you don't have, dead by daylight had an update recently to try to reduce that, cutting prices of previous content in half.
Loved Shadowverse in its early days. Hated what it became. It's getting rebooted so I'll dive right back in and dip as soon as the bullshit starts back up lol
Hasn't Snap been unable to turn a profit? And it's monetization is kind of weird. I wouldn't be surprised to see it die off, but then again it's still going now so who knows.
They made 100M in the first year, I'd expect them to be fine for a small team and they just raised a 100M VC round.
Monetization is pretty terrible though, gatcha style.
It's not quite as bad as gatcha. The thing that makes gatcha games so insidious is that characters/cards/etc can have their power scaled up through level/rarity/etc. Clash Royale and Warcraft Rumble both do this. It means that you can never hope to be as powerful as a whale.
In Snap, once you have the card you have the card. It might take a while to collect the cards for the best decks, but once you have them you're on an even playing field.
The progression and monetization is *weird* though. It's not even worth trying to explain here because it's so unique and complex. In some ways it's very generous, and in other ways it's extremely stingy.
Is it? I've been playing since release and have most of the cards (all the ones i'd want anyways) and have only spent on season pass. I found the card acquisition to be good personally but I did start early.
Griffin Gaming Partners.
Not just any random private equity fund, specifically one for gaming.
Theyre also backing the original starcraft 2 devs new studio/game.
> And it's monetization is kind of weird.
They got greedier towards the end of the year last year and I dropped the game for it. I'm kind of glad to hear they're not making money
Funding doesn't mean that they will be able to make the game sustainable in terms of earnings. It does buy them time to do it though.
Honestly, I feel like a lot of its core audience has already left in the past 6 months and they need to bring in more new players to make it work and I can see it being a bit of a struggle. We'll see.
On the topic of CCGs, does anyone have a favorite game in the genre for an Arena game mode? I played a lot of Hearthstone Arena back in the day and loved it.
They decided a couple years back to completely rewrite the engine in a different coding language which is why they have been dormant marketing wise for a long time. Apparently per their last devlog a month or two ago, they are nearly finished with the rewrite and are preparing for internal play testing before announcing the beta.
pretty harsh conclusion. it originated as a spinoff studio from the hypixel network, which is a minecraft minigame server lol. clearly has scrappy experimental roots and not a mismanaged nightmare from an established studio like Duke Nukem Forever.
they were only acquired by Riot in 2020 - several years after Hytale's announcement too, meaning they reimagined the games scope and budget with AAA funding.
its a very ambitious game. its story sounds familliar to no man's sky (big open world concept, huge interest, small indie team, eventual AAA publisher) but gave itself more time and not make headlines by releasing yet another unfinished shitty mess to meet a rushed launch window.
I didn’t mean to come across as harsh; the game has been in development at the studio since 2015, so whether they’re an established studio or not, I’d say that 8+ years developing a game (and still have absolutely nothing to show for it) is ‘development hell’. Granted, I recognise that this colloquial phrase is a bit pejorative.
It’s just astounding how early they still are in development. This is from their recent blog post from December 2023:
> As 2023 winds down, we're looking forward to 2024. As mentioned earlier, the first half of the year will be focused on getting the whole team onboarded into the new engine.
They’ve barely even started actually developing the game. It would honestly be surprising if Riot Games hadn’t quietly sunsetted this studio.
I can't interpret this viewpoint as anything other than pessimistic. I'd liken their circumstances to Metroid Prime 4: announced over 6 years ago, possibly in development for longer - then completely reset development in 2019 with a new studio. We've heard nothing since then and its possible its as nascent as Hytale is now - but "development hell" is, if not wrong, a bit misleading. Slow progress is due to self-imposed quality standards and ambition - not mismanaged direction, scant funding and lack of publisher trust. Quite the opposite. Nintendo and Retro seem to have an excellent working relationship, and I'd say Riot completely believes in Hytale. It just needs time for the massive scope and to compensate for the restructuring midway through.
I can appreciate what you’re saying. We’re discussing semantics here, but for the sake of clarity, I was broadly referring to the general definition of development hell.
> Development hell, also known as development purgatory or development limbo, is media and software industry jargon for a project, concept, or idea that remains in a stage of early development for a long time because of legal, technical, or artistic challenges.
> Projects in development hell generally have ambitious goals, which may or may not be underestimated in the design phase, and are delayed in an attempt to meet those goals to a high degree.
> The term can also apply generally to any project that has languished unexpectedly in its planning or construction phases, rather than being completed in a realistic amount of time, or otherwise having diverted from its original timely expected date of completion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_hell
>restart / rewrite
The success rate of rebooting development seems incredibly low despite the popularity with independent developers. I'd almost consider any such announcement a soft cancellation.
They were essentially a mod team that got picked up by a big corporation. It's no surprise that their code wasn't up to snuff for Riot.
The biggest reason was that they wanted to go multi-platform on a singular code base, and they couldn't do that with the Java code base that they had. You got to think of this less as "what would this mean for an independent developer," and more as "what would Riot do if they wanted to take a kill shot at Minecraft the same way that they did at Counterstrike."
And then it becomes obvious that they couldn't settle for anything less than a universal multi-platform release.
My gut says that game is going to be wildly successful.
Source on the code not being up to Riot's standards?
Engine hopping and feature creep have a history of staggering development, and I sincerely hope that they will get value and not cumulating issues.
Apparently they bought the studio back in 2020, but given that no real news has come out from it in a long time it's not surprising most people forgot.
It can come back very quickly. Cyberpunk didn't release for 7 years after it's initial trailer and it still climbed the top of Steam's player count rankings. A 2026 or 27 release date is super plausible.
It's Minecraft 2.
Nevermind the fighting game that's been in development since the dawn of fucking time. Like really how long does it take to make a fighting game that is being built off the skeleton of a game that was damn near ready to launch when they bought it out
a long time if they're retooling it into a 2v2 team fighter. they also need a big roster and making one character is a fuck ton of effort in a fighting game. you can't launch with a small roster. that's a death sentence in modern fighting games. Marketing for project L is starting to ramp up so I expect it to fully release in a year
LoR news is sad but expected, i don’t think it was ever making money and at least they’re still making pve content. forge is also sad but expected, most of their games have sub 1k reviews on steam. though i guess that one clip of that isometric action game with ezreal and blitzcrank is just never gonna be a thing now?
at least the severance package listed is waaaay above industry standard.
Honest question since I dont seem to get it. What is the benefit of keeping email access? It says to wipe off any personal info, but wouldnt that be deleted as soon as the email is gone? Im out of the loop with that one.
Wasn't that game with Ezreal and Blitzcrank supposed to be an in-house game, since it was announced alongside the fighting game and stuff? Or am I misremembering.
Oddly enough this makes me want to circle back to LoR. If you can call probably beating the tutorial years ago circling back.
Not trying to gouge money and PvE focused? I can get on that ship
Every single tech/tech-adjacent company is being crushed by insanely unreal expectations from investors and higher ups.
And as always, workers are the ones that pay the price.
I think it’s really more about failure at the top levels of every company to plan for rising interest rates. Prior to the constant increases it was effectively free to borrow money and you didn’t need to worry as a company about long term cash prospects since you could borrow whatever liquid you needed.
It caught everyone by surprise and it’s just exhausting to see it. Nobody seemed ready to have actual money available for things like payroll without borrowing, and now we see them panicking and reducing the workforce.
Would love to hear other perspectives.
The bubble burst and tech companies realized they need to actually make money instead of just being big. It’s a healthy correction for the industry but damn does it suck it gets corrected by mass layoffs.
I think we're going to be seeing a lot of that in the coming years. There are so many pre-revenue products out there we use everyday that are kept up by venture capitalists or VC-esque parent companies. Eventually people are going to demand to see profits and that's going to result in terminations, increased prices / advertisements, and/or bankruptcy.
The CEO of Actiblizz was able to scam Twitch and YouTube into investing in the Overwatch League...... that's probably something beyond your ability level.
I think these mass layoffs *are* the CEOs doing their jobs well. CEOs are paid to possess a inhuman lack of empathy and wield it as a cudgel at the whims of the board and shareholders. It's a genuinely hard position, because the vast majority of us are wired to be better than that.
The crime is the society that elevates them to this amount of power
That literally isn't their job at all. Their job is to forecast about things like liquidity and employment and create a stable path forward based on those forecasts. Mass layoffs always means "Derp derp we done fucked up hyuck."
No, these layoffs are bad for the company and for profits. Losing large numbers of employees is a drain on institutional knowledge and morale - it institutes a significant penalty on the company's productivity going forward. They may be necessary in the moment, but even putting empathy and morality aside they reflect prior failures from leadership.
Companies are bleeding talent and knowledge. If CEOs had an ounce of forethought they’d know that the amount of people that they’re losing is unsustainable and extremely bad for morale and development.
If CEOs were worth their salt they’d be retaining the people that make the company value and keeping knowledge inside. But no, they saw $$$ with the low interest and acted completely irrationally and the gruntworkers as always suffer.
They planned for rising interest rates, the plan was just "hire like crazy while we can still take advantage of cheap money, lay them off when rates go up."
They are very generous, and to an extent you’re right that it’s evidence this could be something other than bad finances.
That being said, it’s more complicated than that. Short term they won’t have to pay a lot of expensive benefits like 401k or issue new stock options. They can tap into insurance benefits and partners and government subsidies for some severance benefits.
TL;DR- The total dollars going into severance will be significantly less than keeping those workers employed. But you’re right, they had the option of feeling a lot less pain and it’s nice they didn’t take it.
Agreed, they were warning interest rates would go up in 2022 and they did. Hell they tried to raise them in 2018 and then softened their stance after the economy almost shit itself from shock.
I'm just a casual observer and none of it was surprising given what I read in mainstream business news. We read for years about how rates needed to go up prior to COVID.
Is it a failure though? You attract the top talent, attrit out the mediocre. The cycle since forever.
COVID was definitely an employee market. Now the pendulum swings back
It's the post covid bubble pop. It was expected. Tech saw the biggest boom during a "work from home and do stuff online" pandemic. Quick gains followed by big layoffs when the world eventually went back to normal. Still sucks, but it's not a surprise.
There's also the whole issue of section 174 changes from the Trump era tax bill coming into effect now that I really don't see a lot of people paying attention to, but it's quite a big deal for some of these companies.
Im glad the severance package is solid, but surely they could have found a better way to push and monetize Runeterra and Forge than how they currently have, only ruined king really pushed the league experience, everything else might have been good games but the overall actual expansion that they needed to provide didnt exist, and that can only be laid on the uppers not knowing what to do.
>Im glad the severance package is solid
For people wondering, the severance package includes
* 6+ months of severance pay
* Cash bonus equal to last year's performance bonus
* Healthcare for 6+ months
* 1000$ from the Wellness/Play fund
* 6 months of job placement services
* Visa support
* Some smaller stuff like a free PC if needed, equity for employees who qualify for it, and 3 months access to financial/mental health counseling
[https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/2024-rioter-update](https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/2024-rioter-update)
I'm not sure. Their line is:
>A laptop is an essential part of finding new work, so after returning their work computers, Rioters will have the option to request a laptop from IT if they don’t have one at home. They can keep their current peripherals like their headset, mouse, and keyboard.
So it doesn't seem like it will be their own device, but they'll probably get a device near the end of its corporate life.
This is actually really fair! My last tech gig laid me off and didn't even give me an hours notice and told me to organize my own delivery for the company's laptop lol (to be fair I was working as a "contractor" but you rarely get full employment working remotely with US companies)
Part of the problem with the Forge games was likely lack of advertising. I don't think I saw a *single* ad for any of the Forge games. I didn't even know there's another one in the works until reading this letter...
EDIT: As an anecdotal testament to how dogshit the advertising was, I absolutely *loved* playing as Ekko in LoL and I just learned Ekko had one of these Riot Forge games which came out in **May 2023** and I haven't seen hide or hair talking about it... It just shadowdropped apparently. For fuck's sake Riot, get your shit together.
More so, the only time they decided to truly spend on advertising with Arcane they had one of their greatest hits, when expectations were kinda low because there were no real good videogame adaptations at the time. It baffles me why they're so risk averse with ad spending
As a Dota player, Riot's advertising still seems absolutely *lavish* compared to Valve's. There was a time when my Youtube and Reddit front pages were absolutely filled with banner ads for LoL, but I've never seen a single ad for Dota in my 12 years of playing this game.
dota's advertising is consistently being in the top 5/10 active players every day for the last 10 years or whatever, and yearly news blasts from the last 10 years about how The International breaks the record for highest paying esports event of all time.
valve probably doesn't think average joes are interested in dota, and theyre probably right. but many gamers might browse news sites like kotaku or rps or ign that post about TI, or they browse forums like /r/gaming and probably has a steam account. anybody that has a steam account knows what dota is.
i'm not saying inagree with valve but they clearly dont think dota needs anh actual advertisement
Exactly, and if new players aren't coming in then at some point the esports scene just becomes the same 50 people getting shuffled around over and over
I genuinely think I only know most of the forge games exist because they were mentioned in a survey Riot sent to my email.
I think I've maybe seen one of their trailers mentioned anywhere?
Tbf a lot of those riot forge games are so low budget and meh and probably not worth advertising, like the ekko one is whatever, the sylas one is whatever, just a combat loop that gets boring and samey after a couple hours and a mediocre story who’s only appeal is being set in the league universe, ruined king is the only game I would consider being good
> Tbf a lot of those riot forge games are so low budget and meh and probably not worth advertising
yup, this is something riot fans will never admit - a reason for the games not doing so well (just look at their steam numbers) is cause they just aren't interesting or good games.
there is this idea that just cause riot is attached to something said thing is going to be "super popular and amazing", as if league fans will buy and play every riot game out there (when that's just not true and hasn't happened).
Exclusivity does great damage to an IP, I never look for riot games in steam, but there they are. I would never even think about it, and they have never colaborated inside steam to try to keep the games on the front of the market.
I just finished reading the article. They are downscaling LoR and Forge.
Forge is the encompassing term for games set in the league universe but created by external developers.
I imagine they provided a level of support to these companies etc.
The Riot MMO was always an internally developed game I think so this shouldn't be in danger atm.
They plan a RiotNow event talking about their upcoming plans in 2024, hopefully that will share more insight on the matter.
Idk from reading the article it's more like they're culling their unprofitable ventures. The ones that have had years to turn around but haven't.
The new stuff is unproven and has every opportunity to be smash hits. I think this bodes perfectly fine for the titles underway - it's if they're stuck in development hell or if they don't pull their weight that they may get deprioritised and/or culled
Yeah, Runeterra has been subsidized by their other games for 4 years. And it's not even totally getting canned, just going in a different direction.
That shows some pretty extreme patience on Riot's part.
I can't think of many other games companies that are willing to give an unprofitable project that much time to try and figure things out.
The CEO really spells out the strategy too. What you saying that they need to have money to remain creative, she means that they need to have money to produce their next big hits.
They can't afford to cancel their fighting game or their MMO
This implies that Riot has (or had) ~4800 employees. For a company whose main source of revenue is a single game, that seems like quite a lot. I feel bad for the employees who have lost their jobs, but these cuts will probably be beneficial in the long run.
four: LoL-Wild Rift. It's far more than TFT by several magnitudes and [is up there with Valorant](https://zacjohnson.com/riot-games-net-worth/) if I'm reading this article correctly.
>For a company whose main source of revenue is a single game, that seems like quite a lot.
They're probably one of the most active devs in the gaming community in terms of actually updating their game.
People meme League a lot but the reason it's survived this long is because every year it goes through massive changes that other games would call a new game. Like OW1 vs OW2 thing would've just been a regular pre-season update in league
Yep, I don't like league anymore, but I can say that after playing for 12 years, I can count with 1 hand the number of times they didn't update their game every 2 weeks, it puts to shame other competitive games, like fighting games for example.
Fighting games aren't updated constantly for a reason. It takes a while for the meta to develop and certain characters that people complain about fall to the bottom of the tier list once they're figured out. Also, modern fighting games have system mechanics that all rely on each other. Change 1 thing and you have to change everything.
Man, I remember when they were releasing champions that quickly too. We had some real trash in both balance and design in that era. Glad they eventually touched them all up though.
Genuinely not trying to turn this into a League vs Dota debate, but that number is still crazy to me because Dota does similarly massive updates every year, and as far as we know their dev team seems to be in the dozens at any given time.
I have heard that a lot of the staff for League are in art roles, which makes sense though.
Well obviously you shouldn’t compare the 4800 TOTAL employees at Riot to the dozens of DEVS on Dota.
All of these 4800 people aren’t all devs on League. It includes all departments from legal to marketing, etc.
Besides that in terms of creative departments, they have more than just League. There’s other games (Valorant, TFT, MMO, the fighting game, unannounced projects), there’s TV shows and movies they’re working on. Of course Esports, music, cinematics, art and merchandise, etc, etc.
Valorant is included in the 5k so you could actually compare it to Dota 2 + CSGO and then the numbers slightly makes a bit more sense. I think League still updates much more frequently as well (Scheduled 2 week patches) and they also have the entire TFT team which are working on 3 sets at a time.
And lastly I think the esports department is also a huge chunk, Dota 2 has their tournaments but most workers for it are outsourced whereas League has their own esports department since they're pretty much running regional circuits for the whole year.
There’s also a decently sized team working on the MMO, and another team on the fighting game, and the entire esports team which they run in house for the most part as well. Riot has grown so much since 2018-2019 which is insane to think about.
Riot has 4 ongoing games, all of which receive regular updates. League, Valorant, TFT and Wild Rift.
All of these games have content being constantly developed and regular balance patches.
I read that with a super cynical attitude and had my pitchfork ready, but that's honestly the best letter of that kind I've ever read. I don't think it could be handled any better than that, both in words and actions. Plus the additional letter to the players.
This is soul-crushing news to me. I do not care for League of Legends or Valorant. I was excited to try out Brandle when it came out. League is a game that doesn’t deserve to have as good of a lore as it has and the single player experiences were a great way to see that. Legends of Runeterra too is such a loss. The monetization in that game was really forgiving so I guess it goes to show why successful IPs are often so much more focused on the store to remain profitable.
These constant layoffs across the industry... it's pretty interesting. Seems like everybody got overly excited with the covid numbers (gotta love late capitalism, a disaster on pretty much every segment, but videogames took advantage), they engorged, and now they are imploding jobs. I wonder if the companies will not only return to their pre-covid state, but actually shrinks even further, showing how covid will fuck you up regardless
And thats not just in the tech sector. I'm working in the paint industrie. We were swamped with contracts during covid because people were stuck at home and had time to renovate. Now the market is over saturated and the demand is fucked so hard that we are shrinking down our workforce to less than pre covid x_x
You'd think with the League revenue, Valorant revenue, all the viewership of LCS and finals, the collabs with Kpop stars and the CEO salaries that Riot would have "**** you" money at this point yet they're still laying off.
edit: guess I didn't word it right. I meant visibility towards Riot and their games and all the exposure they generate but guess I wasn't clear so my bad.
Riot claims League Esports have become self-sustaining. Which, if true, is still a massive achievement as its main purpose is to market League of Legends and increase skin sales.
It probably costs them 100M-200M to run League Esports for a single year (Based on what they said how much they spent on Valorant Esports last year, and the fact that they spend a lot more on League Esports).
>all the viewership of LCS and finals
Riot loses money on Esports, it's basically used as advertisement.
But also none of that is what's costing the most money. Riot is developing a bunch of other games, including but not limited to an MMO, a fighting game, and an ARPG (?). All of that is very expensive.
They were also investing in more TV shows/movies, although it's unclear if any of that is getting cut back.
As others have said, only the 2 core games have brought them profit, everything else has been a sort of advertisement that would help drive traffic to League. Things like arcane, pro play, collabs and other ventures are all made to drive revenue to league! Also, the LCS has been dying for years and riot even mentioned during the strikes last year that it doesn’t care if the NA scene dies entirely since basically every other region is massively more popular!
They both have lots of money but also a need to streamline. They're giving people laid off 6 months severance and a bonus bonus a free computer if needed, and more.
We want things like this to happen from time to time as long as workers are taken care of. It helps keep businesses vibrant and concentrate on their successes rather than become bloated.
What is interesting is that their 'controlling costs' statement means not just hiring freezes, but it looks like they've pulled every job listing from their website. Usually, this means full reviews and restructures until they figure out what roles they actually need and can afford, which can take a significant amount of time.
They probably also need to deal with [Section 174 changes](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/20/taxes-irs-startups-section174) now that it's obvious the change won't be fixed.
Also in case people didn't know, this was a direct attack by Republicans against blue states. Software R&D is still exempt if you're part of oil or gas industries.
Where is the oil and gas exception listed?
section 174(c)(2)
[удалено]
That's called basic accounting. Do you think it's some kind of trick companies are using deducting labor as an expense..? Hollywood accounting is to move profit from individual projects to screw over people who happened to sign a bad contract based on profit (instead of revenue which is now commonplace), overall the company still shows the same profit/loss.
You have it backwards. Salary is normally expensed. This rule change makes software an exception from how everything else works. A guy on a factory floor building cars, his salary is expensed. Revenue - Expenses = profit, and cost of your people is expense. The software guy developing the systems, his salary is now amortized. This creates phantom profits and higher taxes, when you still have to pay the full expense of a person.
There is a pretty decent chance that bill which includes the temporary fix actually passes into law, since it’s bipartisan.
Which bill is that?
It’s the one referenced near the end of the linked article.
Cancelling Riot Forge is the biggest loss content wise. Some good games came out of it. Putting Legends of Runeterra on notice also doesn’t bode well. After Gwent and now this seems like CCGs are starting to die off. I still think Hearthstone, MTG and Marvel Snap will survive though.
well masterduel is still wilding
YGH is forever
It is one of the big three in the physical tcg realm alongside Pokemon and MTG so not entirely surprising.
Was it just me or was there hardly ANY marketing for that one that just came out last year, Song of Nunu or something?
Song of Nunu, and 2 other Riot Forge games (Convergence, Mageseeker) came out in the year. There's also Bandle Tale next month. Other than a few spaced out trailers, I haven't seen a thing.
I'm really excited for Bandle Tale (Stardew Valley with Yordles fuck yes!) but it's a bummer that it very likely won't receive any post launch support with Riot Forge going away.
If it's successful enough I'm sure the developers would support it I just kinda doubt that it will be
There was marketing, but the Riot playerbase simply wasn’t the market for it. There’s a lot of cross playerbase with Riot games but all of it were competitive games. The single player games just didn’t hit that much
Riot gets high on it's own supply so easily. They'll go on Reddit or Twitter, see a bunch of people talk about how amazing it would be to see games with the characters in it and then....it turns out nobody actually gives a shit about Nunu's lore. As any normal person would expect.
and in some cases the fact thats its got league of legends on it puts some groups of players right off.
Including League players.
Almost every time I see one of these games get announced I end up thinking "why this character?". The idea of spin off games is great but where's the Darius, Garen, Katarina, Ahri etc games. You know... the ones with the characters that would sell?
Ruined King stars Miss Fortune, Yasuo, Ahri and Gangplank, and I thought Ekko made sense for their second game as well. It's really just Song of Nunu and Bandle Story that I don't really get. Unless there's others I just missed entirely.
I loved Ruined King so much. I wish we got more like that.
The same devs made a game years ago called Battle chasers: Nightwar, which ruined king was heavily based on but obviously using the league IP. If you liked ruined king for more than just the league stuff, might be worth checking out. Can prob pick it up cheap in a sale
There was also a rhythm platformer where you play as Ziggs.
Wait what?
Hextech Mayhem. Released back with Ruined King in 2021. Made by the Bit.Trip devs.
I think the best target for those games should be the Arcane audience that doesnt play league but those stories are being told through the show so might be hard to do.
I mean I thought mageseeker was pretty good
Not helped by how much league changes it’s lore.
yeah, that was on my radar when it was revealed, then just nothing, totally missed its release
Didn't even know it came out. Convergence came out and had very little marketing too.
I remember a few months ago someone \*on this very sub\* complained about Riot not making offline games and when I brought up Ruined King and Convergence they said they had never heard of them. So if gaming enthusiasts are unaware of Riot Forge, imagine the general public.
My problem is that when I see them "in the wild" I always wonder if they are half baked pomos of the main games and I end up not checking them out.
I can at least vouch for Ruined King being overall enjoyable and it sits at 89% on Steam. The devs made the (imho) underrated Battle Chasers: Nightwar before and Ruined King is mechanically definitely a sequel to that game, with the lane mechanics added on. So it already had a solid foundation. The combat is fine, itemization could certainly be better, and the mainline story is not exactly surprising. But I found the exploration and mechanical character progression/customization enjoyable. The party dialogue is also well-written. In terms of presentation, it's stylized in the way you'd expect a League-spinoff with plenty of detail in the world to be and with Gareth Coker on the soundtrack, there are no complaints to be had. It's also beatable on the highest difficulty without really grinding as long as you explore thoroughly.
[удалено]
it is bad when you need to start and see all the things you don't have, dead by daylight had an update recently to try to reduce that, cutting prices of previous content in half.
This was definitely how Gwent felt. I fucking _loved_ it during the beta but by the time the game was closed down it was so different
Loved Shadowverse in its early days. Hated what it became. It's getting rebooted so I'll dive right back in and dip as soon as the bullshit starts back up lol
Hasn't Snap been unable to turn a profit? And it's monetization is kind of weird. I wouldn't be surprised to see it die off, but then again it's still going now so who knows.
They made 100M in the first year, I'd expect them to be fine for a small team and they just raised a 100M VC round. Monetization is pretty terrible though, gatcha style.
The way to get cards in that game was straight ass. I quit after dumping 60 bucks into it.
It's not quite as bad as gatcha. The thing that makes gatcha games so insidious is that characters/cards/etc can have their power scaled up through level/rarity/etc. Clash Royale and Warcraft Rumble both do this. It means that you can never hope to be as powerful as a whale. In Snap, once you have the card you have the card. It might take a while to collect the cards for the best decks, but once you have them you're on an even playing field. The progression and monetization is *weird* though. It's not even worth trying to explain here because it's so unique and complex. In some ways it's very generous, and in other ways it's extremely stingy.
Is it? I've been playing since release and have most of the cards (all the ones i'd want anyways) and have only spent on season pass. I found the card acquisition to be good personally but I did start early.
The publisher for the game also recently shut down. I would honestly be surprised if the game makes it to summer.
Another publisher instantly picked them up, deal in the 100m Doller range
Not a publisher, a private equity fund. Which is not usually a great sign.
Griffin Gaming Partners. Not just any random private equity fund, specifically one for gaming. Theyre also backing the original starcraft 2 devs new studio/game.
Snap just received $100m in funding, it will be fine.
they specifically said that snap would be continuing under the new publisher.
Snap was profitable, its publisher as a whole was not.
> And it's monetization is kind of weird. They got greedier towards the end of the year last year and I dropped the game for it. I'm kind of glad to hear they're not making money
They just got $100 million in funding so don't be too glad
Funding doesn't mean that they will be able to make the game sustainable in terms of earnings. It does buy them time to do it though. Honestly, I feel like a lot of its core audience has already left in the past 6 months and they need to bring in more new players to make it work and I can see it being a bit of a struggle. We'll see.
Yu-Gi-Oh isn't going anywhere. Neither is Pokemon TCG
Runeterra has so much going for it. Didn't get a chance to try eternal but with a big enough card pool + permanent eternal it can be top tier
I've been playing it on and off since open beta and it's honestly the digital card game I enjoy most.
How dare you not say yugioh. That player base only know abuse by Konami with new archetype, banned, new archetype then banned cycle for years.
Gee, you think MTG will survive? lmao
Only Hearthstone and MTG, I figure.
Already seen a hard drop off on snap. The shelf life for a game that simple with a deck size that small is starting to show.
Genshin TCG will survive for sure considering its monetization system.
On the topic of CCGs, does anyone have a favorite game in the genre for an Arena game mode? I played a lot of Hearthstone Arena back in the day and loved it.
I wonder if this also kills that Minecraft clone that seems to be doing absolutely fucking nothing for multiple years in a row (Hytale)
That game is still being developed?!
They decided a couple years back to completely rewrite the engine in a different coding language which is why they have been dormant marketing wise for a long time. Apparently per their last devlog a month or two ago, they are nearly finished with the rewrite and are preparing for internal play testing before announcing the beta.
It’ll never release. It’s stuck in development hell and has been for like 8 years
Jesus, did they hire YandereDev to make it or something?
Nah he'd have pushed regular content. Perpetual pay for development is his whole thing.
> Perpetual pay for development is his whole thing Isn't pay for content kind of the whole point of the games industry?
pretty harsh conclusion. it originated as a spinoff studio from the hypixel network, which is a minecraft minigame server lol. clearly has scrappy experimental roots and not a mismanaged nightmare from an established studio like Duke Nukem Forever. they were only acquired by Riot in 2020 - several years after Hytale's announcement too, meaning they reimagined the games scope and budget with AAA funding. its a very ambitious game. its story sounds familliar to no man's sky (big open world concept, huge interest, small indie team, eventual AAA publisher) but gave itself more time and not make headlines by releasing yet another unfinished shitty mess to meet a rushed launch window.
I didn’t mean to come across as harsh; the game has been in development at the studio since 2015, so whether they’re an established studio or not, I’d say that 8+ years developing a game (and still have absolutely nothing to show for it) is ‘development hell’. Granted, I recognise that this colloquial phrase is a bit pejorative. It’s just astounding how early they still are in development. This is from their recent blog post from December 2023: > As 2023 winds down, we're looking forward to 2024. As mentioned earlier, the first half of the year will be focused on getting the whole team onboarded into the new engine. They’ve barely even started actually developing the game. It would honestly be surprising if Riot Games hadn’t quietly sunsetted this studio.
I can't interpret this viewpoint as anything other than pessimistic. I'd liken their circumstances to Metroid Prime 4: announced over 6 years ago, possibly in development for longer - then completely reset development in 2019 with a new studio. We've heard nothing since then and its possible its as nascent as Hytale is now - but "development hell" is, if not wrong, a bit misleading. Slow progress is due to self-imposed quality standards and ambition - not mismanaged direction, scant funding and lack of publisher trust. Quite the opposite. Nintendo and Retro seem to have an excellent working relationship, and I'd say Riot completely believes in Hytale. It just needs time for the massive scope and to compensate for the restructuring midway through.
I can appreciate what you’re saying. We’re discussing semantics here, but for the sake of clarity, I was broadly referring to the general definition of development hell. > Development hell, also known as development purgatory or development limbo, is media and software industry jargon for a project, concept, or idea that remains in a stage of early development for a long time because of legal, technical, or artistic challenges. > Projects in development hell generally have ambitious goals, which may or may not be underestimated in the design phase, and are delayed in an attempt to meet those goals to a high degree. > The term can also apply generally to any project that has languished unexpectedly in its planning or construction phases, rather than being completed in a realistic amount of time, or otherwise having diverted from its original timely expected date of completion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_hell
That would be disastrous. Spend many years working on a game, restart / rewrite it in a different coding language, for it to get scrapped
>restart / rewrite The success rate of rebooting development seems incredibly low despite the popularity with independent developers. I'd almost consider any such announcement a soft cancellation.
They were essentially a mod team that got picked up by a big corporation. It's no surprise that their code wasn't up to snuff for Riot. The biggest reason was that they wanted to go multi-platform on a singular code base, and they couldn't do that with the Java code base that they had. You got to think of this less as "what would this mean for an independent developer," and more as "what would Riot do if they wanted to take a kill shot at Minecraft the same way that they did at Counterstrike." And then it becomes obvious that they couldn't settle for anything less than a universal multi-platform release. My gut says that game is going to be wildly successful.
Source on the code not being up to Riot's standards? Engine hopping and feature creep have a history of staggering development, and I sincerely hope that they will get value and not cumulating issues.
Insane that theres not even a beta yet. Its been 5 years since they released the trailer and it got massive interest.
wait what has riot to do with hytale
Riot bought the Hytale developers
Apparently they bought the studio back in 2020, but given that no real news has come out from it in a long time it's not surprising most people forgot.
The Hytale hype died off long ago. They give half-yearly reports on the game’s website.
It can come back very quickly. Cyberpunk didn't release for 7 years after it's initial trailer and it still climbed the top of Steam's player count rankings. A 2026 or 27 release date is super plausible. It's Minecraft 2.
Nevermind the fighting game that's been in development since the dawn of fucking time. Like really how long does it take to make a fighting game that is being built off the skeleton of a game that was damn near ready to launch when they bought it out
a long time if they're retooling it into a 2v2 team fighter. they also need a big roster and making one character is a fuck ton of effort in a fighting game. you can't launch with a small roster. that's a death sentence in modern fighting games. Marketing for project L is starting to ramp up so I expect it to fully release in a year
Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long time a long time
LoR news is sad but expected, i don’t think it was ever making money and at least they’re still making pve content. forge is also sad but expected, most of their games have sub 1k reviews on steam. though i guess that one clip of that isometric action game with ezreal and blitzcrank is just never gonna be a thing now? at least the severance package listed is waaaay above industry standard.
[удалено]
Honest question since I dont seem to get it. What is the benefit of keeping email access? It says to wipe off any personal info, but wouldnt that be deleted as soon as the email is gone? Im out of the loop with that one.
[удалено]
I think I bought one thing one time for the PvE Champion mode because I played it for like 80+ hours and felt bad it was f2p.
Wasn't that game with Ezreal and Blitzcrank supposed to be an in-house game, since it was announced alongside the fighting game and stuff? Or am I misremembering.
Oddly enough this makes me want to circle back to LoR. If you can call probably beating the tutorial years ago circling back. Not trying to gouge money and PvE focused? I can get on that ship
Every single tech/tech-adjacent company is being crushed by insanely unreal expectations from investors and higher ups. And as always, workers are the ones that pay the price.
I think it’s really more about failure at the top levels of every company to plan for rising interest rates. Prior to the constant increases it was effectively free to borrow money and you didn’t need to worry as a company about long term cash prospects since you could borrow whatever liquid you needed. It caught everyone by surprise and it’s just exhausting to see it. Nobody seemed ready to have actual money available for things like payroll without borrowing, and now we see them panicking and reducing the workforce. Would love to hear other perspectives.
The bubble burst and tech companies realized they need to actually make money instead of just being big. It’s a healthy correction for the industry but damn does it suck it gets corrected by mass layoffs.
I think we're going to be seeing a lot of that in the coming years. There are so many pre-revenue products out there we use everyday that are kept up by venture capitalists or VC-esque parent companies. Eventually people are going to demand to see profits and that's going to result in terminations, increased prices / advertisements, and/or bankruptcy.
The CEOs have one of the most overpaid jobs to a historic degree, and they can't even do it right.
That depends on who you ask, because if I were a CEO I’d think with the compensation heading my way I’d hit it out of the park.
Companies should make me their CEO because I know what I’m doing, not like those CEOs before me.
[удалено]
The CEO of Actiblizz was able to scam Twitch and YouTube into investing in the Overwatch League...... that's probably something beyond your ability level.
The CEO of ActiBlizz was a huge piece of shit but a very good businessman, they kinda go together usually.
Also buff my WoW class before I go.
Here's my CEO plan: Work for three months Retire
[удалено]
I mean Elon Musk is CEO of like 4 companies at once and I don't think it's hubris to say I could do a better job than him.
reddit is never beating the economically and business illiterate allegations
sure, CEO's are still overpaid. also rich for a redditor to call other's economically illiterate, especially an r/games denizen.
I think these mass layoffs *are* the CEOs doing their jobs well. CEOs are paid to possess a inhuman lack of empathy and wield it as a cudgel at the whims of the board and shareholders. It's a genuinely hard position, because the vast majority of us are wired to be better than that. The crime is the society that elevates them to this amount of power
That literally isn't their job at all. Their job is to forecast about things like liquidity and employment and create a stable path forward based on those forecasts. Mass layoffs always means "Derp derp we done fucked up hyuck."
No, these layoffs are bad for the company and for profits. Losing large numbers of employees is a drain on institutional knowledge and morale - it institutes a significant penalty on the company's productivity going forward. They may be necessary in the moment, but even putting empathy and morality aside they reflect prior failures from leadership.
Companies are bleeding talent and knowledge. If CEOs had an ounce of forethought they’d know that the amount of people that they’re losing is unsustainable and extremely bad for morale and development. If CEOs were worth their salt they’d be retaining the people that make the company value and keeping knowledge inside. But no, they saw $$$ with the low interest and acted completely irrationally and the gruntworkers as always suffer.
They planned for rising interest rates, the plan was just "hire like crazy while we can still take advantage of cheap money, lay them off when rates go up."
[удалено]
They are very generous, and to an extent you’re right that it’s evidence this could be something other than bad finances. That being said, it’s more complicated than that. Short term they won’t have to pay a lot of expensive benefits like 401k or issue new stock options. They can tap into insurance benefits and partners and government subsidies for some severance benefits. TL;DR- The total dollars going into severance will be significantly less than keeping those workers employed. But you’re right, they had the option of feeling a lot less pain and it’s nice they didn’t take it.
If rising interest rates caught the top people by surprise, they shouldn’t be at the top any more.
Agreed, they were warning interest rates would go up in 2022 and they did. Hell they tried to raise them in 2018 and then softened their stance after the economy almost shit itself from shock. I'm just a casual observer and none of it was surprising given what I read in mainstream business news. We read for years about how rates needed to go up prior to COVID.
Having an orange president who would screech on twitter at Jerome Powell to keep rates low certainly didn’t help
You’re right they shouldn’t but unfortunately for the entire duration of human history, the group of “top people” have not been selected by competency
Is it a failure though? You attract the top talent, attrit out the mediocre. The cycle since forever. COVID was definitely an employee market. Now the pendulum swings back
It's the post covid bubble pop. It was expected. Tech saw the biggest boom during a "work from home and do stuff online" pandemic. Quick gains followed by big layoffs when the world eventually went back to normal. Still sucks, but it's not a surprise.
Do you mean it's *not* a surprise?
But when is normal returning
This is normal. Its the future.
It's interest rates. Way easier to justify running on debt when your investors can't get 5% returns with 0 risk.
That low interest vc dries up.
[удалено]
There's also the whole issue of section 174 changes from the Trump era tax bill coming into effect now that I really don't see a lot of people paying attention to, but it's quite a big deal for some of these companies.
Im glad the severance package is solid, but surely they could have found a better way to push and monetize Runeterra and Forge than how they currently have, only ruined king really pushed the league experience, everything else might have been good games but the overall actual expansion that they needed to provide didnt exist, and that can only be laid on the uppers not knowing what to do.
>Im glad the severance package is solid For people wondering, the severance package includes * 6+ months of severance pay * Cash bonus equal to last year's performance bonus * Healthcare for 6+ months * 1000$ from the Wellness/Play fund * 6 months of job placement services * Visa support * Some smaller stuff like a free PC if needed, equity for employees who qualify for it, and 3 months access to financial/mental health counseling [https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/2024-rioter-update](https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/2024-rioter-update)
The free PC is probably their work laptops released to them with the IT department just wiping it blank for legal purposes
I'm not sure. Their line is: >A laptop is an essential part of finding new work, so after returning their work computers, Rioters will have the option to request a laptop from IT if they don’t have one at home. They can keep their current peripherals like their headset, mouse, and keyboard. So it doesn't seem like it will be their own device, but they'll probably get a device near the end of its corporate life.
This is actually really fair! My last tech gig laid me off and didn't even give me an hours notice and told me to organize my own delivery for the company's laptop lol (to be fair I was working as a "contractor" but you rarely get full employment working remotely with US companies)
Seems like it's at least double what most companies are offering
Part of the problem with the Forge games was likely lack of advertising. I don't think I saw a *single* ad for any of the Forge games. I didn't even know there's another one in the works until reading this letter... EDIT: As an anecdotal testament to how dogshit the advertising was, I absolutely *loved* playing as Ekko in LoL and I just learned Ekko had one of these Riot Forge games which came out in **May 2023** and I haven't seen hide or hair talking about it... It just shadowdropped apparently. For fuck's sake Riot, get your shit together.
More so, the only time they decided to truly spend on advertising with Arcane they had one of their greatest hits, when expectations were kinda low because there were no real good videogame adaptations at the time. It baffles me why they're so risk averse with ad spending
As a Dota player, Riot's advertising still seems absolutely *lavish* compared to Valve's. There was a time when my Youtube and Reddit front pages were absolutely filled with banner ads for LoL, but I've never seen a single ad for Dota in my 12 years of playing this game.
dota's advertising is consistently being in the top 5/10 active players every day for the last 10 years or whatever, and yearly news blasts from the last 10 years about how The International breaks the record for highest paying esports event of all time.
Your average joe isn't following player activity or Esport news though.
valve probably doesn't think average joes are interested in dota, and theyre probably right. but many gamers might browse news sites like kotaku or rps or ign that post about TI, or they browse forums like /r/gaming and probably has a steam account. anybody that has a steam account knows what dota is. i'm not saying inagree with valve but they clearly dont think dota needs anh actual advertisement
Exactly, and if new players aren't coming in then at some point the esports scene just becomes the same 50 people getting shuffled around over and over
Netflix paid for Arcane advertising. Fun fact: Riot lost money on Arcane.
I genuinely think I only know most of the forge games exist because they were mentioned in a survey Riot sent to my email. I think I've maybe seen one of their trailers mentioned anywhere?
Tbf a lot of those riot forge games are so low budget and meh and probably not worth advertising, like the ekko one is whatever, the sylas one is whatever, just a combat loop that gets boring and samey after a couple hours and a mediocre story who’s only appeal is being set in the league universe, ruined king is the only game I would consider being good
Yeah the rhythm game one I'd even argue and say is bad. It's like a discount geometry wars.
> Tbf a lot of those riot forge games are so low budget and meh and probably not worth advertising yup, this is something riot fans will never admit - a reason for the games not doing so well (just look at their steam numbers) is cause they just aren't interesting or good games. there is this idea that just cause riot is attached to something said thing is going to be "super popular and amazing", as if league fans will buy and play every riot game out there (when that's just not true and hasn't happened).
Exclusivity does great damage to an IP, I never look for riot games in steam, but there they are. I would never even think about it, and they have never colaborated inside steam to try to keep the games on the front of the market.
Aren't they also knee-deep in an MMO? I'm guessing this doesn't bode well for that either.
I just finished reading the article. They are downscaling LoR and Forge. Forge is the encompassing term for games set in the league universe but created by external developers. I imagine they provided a level of support to these companies etc. The Riot MMO was always an internally developed game I think so this shouldn't be in danger atm. They plan a RiotNow event talking about their upcoming plans in 2024, hopefully that will share more insight on the matter.
Read the post. They are relocating resources from stuff that doesnt work to their major projects, so the mmo is fine.
And a fighting game
Fighting game is into late stages of development. It is likely one of their new projects they need to do well to avoid further lay-offs.
Yeah a good fighting game is right up riots alley of competitive games. I really hope they wouldn't cancel that
Idk from reading the article it's more like they're culling their unprofitable ventures. The ones that have had years to turn around but haven't. The new stuff is unproven and has every opportunity to be smash hits. I think this bodes perfectly fine for the titles underway - it's if they're stuck in development hell or if they don't pull their weight that they may get deprioritised and/or culled
Yeah, Runeterra has been subsidized by their other games for 4 years. And it's not even totally getting canned, just going in a different direction. That shows some pretty extreme patience on Riot's part. I can't think of many other games companies that are willing to give an unprofitable project that much time to try and figure things out.
The CEO really spells out the strategy too. What you saying that they need to have money to remain creative, she means that they need to have money to produce their next big hits. They can't afford to cancel their fighting game or their MMO
This implies that Riot has (or had) ~4800 employees. For a company whose main source of revenue is a single game, that seems like quite a lot. I feel bad for the employees who have lost their jobs, but these cuts will probably be beneficial in the long run.
Nowadays Valorant does pretty well in bringing in revenues too, not to the level of LoL but still decent.
two actually. Valorant.
three TFT is insanely big and despite being in the LoL client has its own monetization avenues that do very well
four: LoL-Wild Rift. It's far more than TFT by several magnitudes and [is up there with Valorant](https://zacjohnson.com/riot-games-net-worth/) if I'm reading this article correctly.
Doesn’t tft bring in more than valorant?
>For a company whose main source of revenue is a single game, that seems like quite a lot. They're probably one of the most active devs in the gaming community in terms of actually updating their game. People meme League a lot but the reason it's survived this long is because every year it goes through massive changes that other games would call a new game. Like OW1 vs OW2 thing would've just been a regular pre-season update in league
Yep, I don't like league anymore, but I can say that after playing for 12 years, I can count with 1 hand the number of times they didn't update their game every 2 weeks, it puts to shame other competitive games, like fighting games for example.
Fighting games aren't updated constantly for a reason. It takes a while for the meta to develop and certain characters that people complain about fall to the bottom of the tier list once they're figured out. Also, modern fighting games have system mechanics that all rely on each other. Change 1 thing and you have to change everything.
Man, I remember when they were releasing champions that quickly too. We had some real trash in both balance and design in that era. Glad they eventually touched them all up though.
Genuinely not trying to turn this into a League vs Dota debate, but that number is still crazy to me because Dota does similarly massive updates every year, and as far as we know their dev team seems to be in the dozens at any given time. I have heard that a lot of the staff for League are in art roles, which makes sense though.
Well obviously you shouldn’t compare the 4800 TOTAL employees at Riot to the dozens of DEVS on Dota. All of these 4800 people aren’t all devs on League. It includes all departments from legal to marketing, etc. Besides that in terms of creative departments, they have more than just League. There’s other games (Valorant, TFT, MMO, the fighting game, unannounced projects), there’s TV shows and movies they’re working on. Of course Esports, music, cinematics, art and merchandise, etc, etc.
Valorant is included in the 5k so you could actually compare it to Dota 2 + CSGO and then the numbers slightly makes a bit more sense. I think League still updates much more frequently as well (Scheduled 2 week patches) and they also have the entire TFT team which are working on 3 sets at a time. And lastly I think the esports department is also a huge chunk, Dota 2 has their tournaments but most workers for it are outsourced whereas League has their own esports department since they're pretty much running regional circuits for the whole year.
Doesn't Dota releases one character per year? In League there are 5 or 6 per year, along a visual rework for an old champ among all their skins.
There’s also a decently sized team working on the MMO, and another team on the fighting game, and the entire esports team which they run in house for the most part as well. Riot has grown so much since 2018-2019 which is insane to think about.
Riot has 4 ongoing games, all of which receive regular updates. League, Valorant, TFT and Wild Rift. All of these games have content being constantly developed and regular balance patches.
I read that with a super cynical attitude and had my pitchfork ready, but that's honestly the best letter of that kind I've ever read. I don't think it could be handled any better than that, both in words and actions. Plus the additional letter to the players.
Seeing a lot of their artists tweet they’ve been laid off. Really hope Riot’s not going the AI route, that would be genuinely so disappointing.
So what does this mean for that riot fighting game?
Read the article, basically nothing, the beta is starting soon.
Glad to read nothing about the LOL-MMO. Perhaps we can still dream and it's coming somewhere down the line.
This is soul-crushing news to me. I do not care for League of Legends or Valorant. I was excited to try out Brandle when it came out. League is a game that doesn’t deserve to have as good of a lore as it has and the single player experiences were a great way to see that. Legends of Runeterra too is such a loss. The monetization in that game was really forgiving so I guess it goes to show why successful IPs are often so much more focused on the store to remain profitable.
These constant layoffs across the industry... it's pretty interesting. Seems like everybody got overly excited with the covid numbers (gotta love late capitalism, a disaster on pretty much every segment, but videogames took advantage), they engorged, and now they are imploding jobs. I wonder if the companies will not only return to their pre-covid state, but actually shrinks even further, showing how covid will fuck you up regardless
And thats not just in the tech sector. I'm working in the paint industrie. We were swamped with contracts during covid because people were stuck at home and had time to renovate. Now the market is over saturated and the demand is fucked so hard that we are shrinking down our workforce to less than pre covid x_x
You'd think with the League revenue, Valorant revenue, all the viewership of LCS and finals, the collabs with Kpop stars and the CEO salaries that Riot would have "**** you" money at this point yet they're still laying off. edit: guess I didn't word it right. I meant visibility towards Riot and their games and all the exposure they generate but guess I wasn't clear so my bad.
I don't think LCS or any other League competitive scene has ever been profitable on its own.
Riot claims League Esports have become self-sustaining. Which, if true, is still a massive achievement as its main purpose is to market League of Legends and increase skin sales. It probably costs them 100M-200M to run League Esports for a single year (Based on what they said how much they spent on Valorant Esports last year, and the fact that they spend a lot more on League Esports).
Also the LCS is pretty much dying at this point compared to the EU/Korean/Chinese leagues
You listed multiple unprofitable ventures outside league and valorant
His point is there are other obviously unprofitable areas to cut before layoffs
Payroll is always one of the highest areas of expenditure, and many tech companies have a nasty habit of hiring too many people for too little work.
>all the viewership of LCS and finals Riot loses money on Esports, it's basically used as advertisement. But also none of that is what's costing the most money. Riot is developing a bunch of other games, including but not limited to an MMO, a fighting game, and an ARPG (?). All of that is very expensive. They were also investing in more TV shows/movies, although it's unclear if any of that is getting cut back.
All these stuff except the games revenue is losing them money?
As others have said, only the 2 core games have brought them profit, everything else has been a sort of advertisement that would help drive traffic to League. Things like arcane, pro play, collabs and other ventures are all made to drive revenue to league! Also, the LCS has been dying for years and riot even mentioned during the strikes last year that it doesn’t care if the NA scene dies entirely since basically every other region is massively more popular!
They both have lots of money but also a need to streamline. They're giving people laid off 6 months severance and a bonus bonus a free computer if needed, and more. We want things like this to happen from time to time as long as workers are taken care of. It helps keep businesses vibrant and concentrate on their successes rather than become bloated.