Even media giants like Riot Games occasionally face challenges, and today is one such moment. The company, which developed and released Valorant, League of Legends, and many other projects, announced significant cuts to its staff last night.
An announcement titled "Changes at Riot and the Road Ahead" appeared on the official Riot Games website, where the company representatives shared the sad news with all their fans. It states that in order to effectively develop existing games and bring many new features, the company decided to lay off 530 employees, which is about 11% of the total number of people working at Riot.
We want to inform you that we are refocusing on a smaller number of high-impact projects in order to move towards a more sustainable future. For most of our history, we have managed to avoid such days, but this decision is crucial for the future of Riot. This means we are eliminating about 530 roles worldwide, which constitutes about 11% of employees, with the most significant impact on teams outside of core development.
The developers assure that this decision was not made to appease shareholders or increase quarterly profits. The reason lies in the fact that over the past few years, Riot Games' staff has almost doubled, making this decision a necessity. However, the company's management promises that the layoffs will not affect the main projects. League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, Wild Rift, and of course, our beloved Valorant will remain a priority and will be supported at the same level as before the layoffs. The layoffs mainly affect the card game Legends of Runeterra and the Riot Forge project, which was supposed to create games based on the studio's franchises.
How will the layoffs affect Valorant?
Following this sad news, the Valorant community began to wonder whether the layoffs will affect their favorite shooter. While the developers assured that it wouldn't, observant fans noticed that all job openings previously announced by the company had disappeared from the official Riot Games website.
Remember, Valorant is planned to be released on mobile devices and gaming consoles in 2024. Therefore, there were several vacancies on the Riot site related to these projects. Now, after the news of the layoffs, fans can only hope that the necessary people for these vacancies have already been found; otherwise, the release of Valorant on other platforms will be delayed. Most likely, the layoffs will not affect the Valorant tournament scene (VCT, Game Changers, Challengers), nor the scale of championships. We will follow the official information to learn about all the changes in Riot Games.
Comments