• Riot Games announced it was shifting its focus onto its more popular titles including League of Legends and Valorant.
• Development on Legends of Runterra will be slowed and Riot Forge is being shuttered altogether.
• Unfortunately, 530 Riot Games staff are being let go as a result.

On Monday, League of Legends and Valorant developer Riot Games announced it would be shifting its focus to its bigger, more popular titles and as such, as many as 530 staffers would lose their jobs.

“For most of our history, we’ve managed to avoid days like this, but this decision is critical for the future of Riot. This isn’t to appease shareholders or to hit a quarterly earnings number—it’s a necessity. Over the past few years, as Riot more than doubled in headcount, we spread our efforts across more and more projects without sharp enough razors to decide what players needed most. 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,” chief executive officer Dylan Jadeja and chief product officer Marc Merrill wrote.

Importantly, both men retain their high-paying positions.

With these layoffs, Riot is cutting its staff complement by around 11 percent which is a notable cut. According to the CEO, the developer has been growing since 2019 and much like most of Silicon Valley and other big-tech firms, the growth Riot Games was eyeing wasn’t sustainable.

Back in 2019 Riot Games announced multiple projects including what would become Valorant, auto-battler Legends of Runeterra and a yet-to-be-released fighting game dubbed Project L.

The CEO says that today, Riot is unfocused and has too many projects underway. Gee, we wonder who decided to push all those projects? Were any of the 530 people that were fired on Monday responsible for those decisions?

It’s notable that while Jadeja claims “this is absolutely the last thing we ever wanted to do” there is mention of hiring slowdowns and even freezes as well as “controlling costs” in a bid to address the unsustainable conditions.

The CEO notes that things have been tough for Riot staffers. Whether this means that executive pay was cut is unclear, but it does worry us that staff who were already in a tough situation now have fewer resources to make use of likely leading to crunch and more stress at work.

For the 530 staff who have lost their jobs, Riot is offering six months of salary as severance, a cash bonus equal to the 2023 Annual Performance bonus and health benefits until the last day of employment.

As for the games, League of Legends, Valorant, Team Fight Tactics and Wild Rift will continue to be developed.

Legends of Runterra however, will have its development team reduced and focus will shift to the Path of Champions PvE game mode.

Riot Forge, the arm of Riot where players can develop games using Riot’s assets is being shuttered following the launch of Bandle Tale.

“Forge has been our collaboration with external studios to develop smaller scale games in our IP. While we’re proud of what we’ve created in this space, and we’re grateful for the Forge team and for our external partners who made these games happen, we don’t view this as core to our strategy moving forward. We aren’t closing the door entirely on single-player experiences or working with other developers if the right project comes along, but we would want it to look pretty different in the future,” Jadeja wrote.

Following this news, Riot staffers who have lost their jobs have taken to social media to express their discontent while also making it known they are actively seeking work.

It’s a terrible situation and one that is seemingly plaguing every game developer no matter how successful or well-known it may be.