Riot Games reviews

One fact you need to understand should you happen to work in the publishing group and potentially any other group in the company: this is a production driven company. Producers, Product Owners, and Project Managers are the deciders. This in itself is not a con, as it's one of the reasons Riot has been so successful, but like any organizational structure, it presents some issues. Good producers have a great impact, but inept ones are very frustrating to deal with and have a disproportionate amount of power. When a producer and someone from publishing are able to get along, to understand and listen to each other, and to make decisions together, Riot is unmatched in our ability to deliver product experiences that players love. This is often the case, but unfortunately it's not always. There are two major challenges to working in a production driven environment: Release dates for features are constantly in flux. The added struggle for someone in publishing is that it's not just a "when it's done" attitude (which is a good attitude to have), it's that as soon as it's done, producers want to ship immediately. And since the various feature teams don't coordinate their releases, you'll have situations where a period of time will go by with no content, and then all of a sudden you have to make a stack rank of feature promotion and some things will just not get the attention they should. There's rarely a desire for production to ever wait once it's "ready", and because of that, players miss out. Missed opportunities come from SOME (not the majority) producers, mostly at the associate level, that either don't know the expertise of the publishing group, or don't see the value in marketing or community. Their are a lot of meetings or talks that these producers will set up that at first appear like they are interested in what publishing thinks about a feature, when really they just want to hear themselves talk and have publishing act as "yes men". Disagreeing in these meetings will usually be dismissed. If you are coming from a place where you are used to marketing or business development calling the shots, and you liked that sort of environment, this is not the place for you.

The truth is that your experiences at Riot will depend heavily on your manager, your team, and your discipline. Some teams are awesome with high levels of cohesion, while others don't have accountability or great work environments. It is really hard to call out any particular team or discipline as there are people in all disciplines who work selflessly, but the people who normally get ahead are those that are friends with senior management or who are directly hired into positions they aren't any more qualified for than people currently in the organization. It's a sad fact that people doing similar jobs in different parts of the organization get paid different amounts and many of the people brought in over the past year are paid more than the rest of us and aren't bringing any more value.