Rebekah Valentine
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Riot Games has announced it will be laying off an unknown number of developers from the League of Legends PC development team, while simultaneously pledging to increase the size of the League of Legends team.
In a post to X/Twitter today, Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill shared “An Update on How We’re Evolving League” in which he announced the layoffs, explaining that this “isn’t about reducing headcount to save money.” Instead, the layoffs are apparently occurring so the company can make “sure we have the right expertise.”
“While team effectiveness is more important than team size, the League team will eventually be even larger than it is today as we develop the next phase of League,” Merrill continued. “For Rioters who are laid off, we’re supporting them with a severance package that includes a minimum of six months’ pay, annual bonus, job placement assistance, health coverage, and more.”
Merrill continued his explanation in a follow-up post, in which he said that the success of a development team is unrelated to its size. “If we’re solving the wrong problems, more resources won’t fix it. It’s about building smarter and healthier, not just bigger.”
While we’re on the subject of team size, I want to talk a little about both size and budget, and why they aren’t the right way to measure whether a team will be successful. We’ve definitely been memed in the past for talking about budgets, and rightly so. Success isn’t about…
— Tryndamere (@MarcMerrill) October 15, 2024
IGN has reached out to Riot Games for more clarity on why these layoffs are occurring, how many roles were impacted, and if any of those individuals are being considered for placement in roles as a part of the planned team expansion. A spokesperson confirmed that 27 employees were impacted across League of Legends development team and an additional five roles on Riot’s publishing team. The spokesperson stated that those impacted would have the ability to use the company’s internal job board to apply for other roles at Riot, but declined to share anything else.
These layoffs come rather uncomfortably as League of Legends celebrates its 15th anniversary, which Merrill references briefly in the post “so that League continues to be great for another 15 years and beyond.” They also come nine months after Riot already laid off 530 individuals, roughly 11% of its staff, in an effort to cut costs after allegedly taking on too many “big bets” as a company.
According to a games industry layoff tracker, this puts the number of laid off game developers this year alone at over 13,000, with over 10,000 laid off in 2023 and over 8,000 in 2022. We wrote about how the ongoing industry mass layoffs have impacted developers earlier this year.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.