(Los Angeles) League of Legends publisher Riot Games announced Monday it would cut 530 jobs worldwide, or 11% of its workforce, a move it portrayed as “necessary.”
Posted at 7:57 am.
The layoffs at Riot, owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent, come after a difficult year in the video game industry marked by staff cuts.
Riot has developed big hits like League of Legends and Valorant, but believes the company has taken on too many projects in recent years.
“Today we are a company whose focus is not clear enough, and to put it simply, we have too much going on,” CEO Dylan Jadeja wrote in an email to Teams.
“Our significant investments have not paid off for some as we expected. “Our costs have reached a point where they are no longer sustainable,” he explained.
In addition to its headquarters in Los Angeles, California, the company has around twenty branches abroad, including Berlin, Sao Paulo, Seoul and Sydney.
Thousands of people have already lost their jobs in the technology sector in the last 18 months, including at the biggest players in video games such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and the streaming platform Twitch.
League of Legends has become one of the most played video games in the world with enormous success. Every year tens of millions of people watch live broadcasts of the competitions.
In its press release, the company clarified that it will prioritize teams from League of Legends and other video games that benefit from frequent updates, while the Riot Forge label will be phased out.