Riot Games reviews

The world changes and what made Riot great years ago isn’t the case today. If one were to isolate a turning point in Riot’s culture, my money’s on the Tencent buy-out in late 2015. Company culture, which used to be flawed (as any place is) but usually good at heart has become much more “Lord of the Flies” as senior leaders are preoccupied with empire building or just completely checked out. Often you can find multiple layers of management (including the top) who have no idea what is going on and who stonewall progress because good ideas aren’t theirs. Organizational planning is more or less nonexistent which at thousands of employees means lots of redundant work and people with no real responsibility free-riding. Relatively straightforward questions of business direction are still unanswered to the point of crippling progress due to an inability to get out of a no-decision spiral. Acquisitions are poorly integrated and seem like boondoggles for our senior leaders and finance team rather than genuine ways of extending our products or reach. Leadership is unconcerned with the above and pretty content to fiddle while Rome burns, or more specifically they seem to prefer hanging out with other LA celebrities and spend their money and company resources vs. generating new business. Progress on new titles is glacial, I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve been beaten to market. The most successful use of our IP in the last seven years (honor of Kings) wasn't made by us and there has been no perspective from leadership on either why that shouldn’t have been Riot or how we’re going to meaningfully change in the future to be more successful at shipping new experiences to players. The most concerning part is the low sense of urgency even after many years of setbacks. I’ve had high-performing colleagues who have switched off of new games teams of their own volition because they were bored due to lack of work. Core gamer dogma means this place is non-inclusive as all getout. There are plenty of people who are gamers and care about games who aren't willing to invest in competitive PvP. Some of them may even have different backgrounds and ideas. Crazy, I know.

-Veterans are leaving. Leadership will site our turnover stats are low, but this is extremely deceptive when hiring at the rate we are. Across all departments, competent people are voluntarily leaving and senior leaders don't really get why. -Politicians are winning in senior leadership. Relationship management with Marc and Brandon becomes more important every year. The business has grown too fast around them and they struggle to keep up. This has allowed for smooth talkers and yes-men (they are all men) to slip into highly influential positions while leaders focused on doing actual work get left behind. -Serious lack of work ethic. Take a tour through the office and look at how many people are playing games, web browsing, or updating their LinkedIn profile. Then ask why League seems to seriously lack many features common to other online games or the last time League shipped a patch without immediately having to disable key content. Marginal features and content get credit as if they are a major release. It's incredibly demoralizing to see how many people coast, which is why ambitious talent are the ones leaving the company. -Creative Development. This entire department, tasked with expanding the League IP, has directionless leadership, low output, and high organizational cost. The team itself essentially relies on a few creative figures to ship anything: every single other project has failed or been endlessly delayed. Churn is high on the team; seasoned professionals leave without having a single release under their belt. Every single project meets intense executive scrutiny, despite having no bottom line impact and little player impact compared to League. This frustrates both people work on the projects and the rest of the organization; the former because the executive team does not have an expertise in creative work, and the latter because it inhibits their ability to get feedback and approvals, as well as creating the perception that CDev work is way more important and valuable. -Reorgs every six months. Like clockwork, every six months or so the company goes through a reorg or structural shift. Typically this has no impact on senior leaders but rather their direct reports get shuffled around, teams are broken down and rebuilt, and generally not much changes or improves. It's annoying, costly, and pointless, and has not done anything to solve execution problems. -Riot's definition of quality or good. The simplest way of creating conflict, delaying or killing a project, and scoring points, is to question or talk about a product in terms of the "Riot Quality Bar." The Riot Quality Bar, an aesthetic imperative, is totally undefined and is not connected in any way to core company values or stated goals. Conversations are supposed to ultimately about player value, however overwhelmingly the topic of the quality can dominate decision-making instead of player impact. Genre-Defining or Brand Values are also used as euphemisms for the Riot Quality bar. The direct consequence of this is general analysis paralysis, circular debating, dismissal of data, slowing output, and an inordinate amount of time spent on elements tangential at best to the success of the core product. Overall, if you are someone looking to get things done and make big changes, for now its probably a good idea to stay away. You'll be frustrated carrying your co-workers while leaders take credit, and seeing the huge time cost of meaningless debates around you. It's unlikely the company will be able to ship a seriously game changing product until it's financial situation starts to go seriously wrong.