"Player's experience first / Challenge convention / Focus on talent and team / Take play seriously / Stay hungry; stay humble."
On paper, the Riot manifesto looks amazing. But in reality, each item of the manifesto is either being interpreted in a different way, not being used at all, or weaponized.
The visible implications of this are:
- Rioters would prioritize their well-being over player’s experience because the sense of entitlement has never been kept in check. Many employees play 5-6 hours a day. You don’t really need to work hard to be successful (you actually don’t need to be successful at all, just average and quiet).
- Nobody feels accountable for anything meaning that nobody really cares about delivering on time, or simply delivering anything at all.
- Doing anything is always about finding a consensus or getting alignment, never about challenging convention. Challenging convention is actually risky at Riot because you can easily be labelled as “complicated to work with”, “pig headed” or “culturally not aligned”. If you really want to push something without getting the approval of 50 people, you better be right because if you are right, leaders will congratulate you for that, but if you are wrong, they will tell you that you should have listened and will not trust you anymore for anything. Simply put, it’s safer to keep it low or you could get blamed for that.
- Since Riot only has one game for now, innovating is always a risk. You don’t want to screw up your cash cow.
- Innovation is also not possible because League has so many things to do to just catch up with the competition (because the team is so slow at delivering anything).
And the results are that:
- Everything takes forever.
- High achievers get bored and leave.
- The ones who stay get frustrated and become either toxic or chronic complainers (labelled “snowflakes” internally).
-Mediocrity becomes more and more the norm.
All these behaviours are due to a lack of distinct direction, ownership and accountability at every level. But at the end of the day, individual contributors are not the ones to blame. It is up to the leadership to create an environment enabling every contributor to succeed in delivering value to players.
