Riot Games, the company behind major esports titles like “League of Legends” and “Wild Rift”, is cutting 530 jobs worldwide in a bid to save costs and refocus.
The company, owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent since 2011, announced the step in a statement on its website. It called the move to eliminate around 11 percent of its global workforce “critical for the future of Riot.” The memo went on to justify the need for this downsizing exercise on increased costs and big bets that hadn’t paid off.
“We have to do more to focus our business and center our efforts on the things that drive the most player value – the things that are truly worth players’ time,” CEO Dylan Jadeja wrote. “This is absolutely the last thing we ever wanted to do.”
Changes will include reducing the size of the “Legends of Runeterra” teams and completely shutting down its experimental third-party publishing label Riot Forge.
However, the downsizing does aim to refocus resources on its major esports titles such as “League of Legends”.
The restructuring exercise coincides with news from China, where recently announced new draft rules from the country’s gaming regulator have seemingly been removed again. The proposals to limit player spend caused tech stocks to plummet and wiped billions off the country’s stock market. Now, the draft rules have seemingly been removed from the National Press and Publication Administration’s website, a day after the public consultation period ended.
