I personally have not been laid off. I remain a Creative Advisor at Riot Games. I am on a relatively small team called IP Strategy. My job primarily involves IP organization and lore management across teams. To put it in simple terms, my job is to work with various team leads to make sure our lore/creative direction is as coherent and reasonably-aligned as possible across Riot Games products.
(As usual, I will not respond to questions about lore/canonicity or most specifics beyond what I've said here, sorry. I am paid quite well, but I am not paid enough to act as a PR arm of Riot Games. This post contains my personal opinions, nothing official.)
I believe that on both a humanitarian and a business level, it is rarely a good thing to lay off workers. I find it hard to believe that layoffs would ever be an appropriate response from a company that has income levels comparable to Riot Games. Thus, I am extremely disappointed in Riot Games for this decision.
I believe firmly that layoffs, especially mass layoffs like this, carry with them hidden costs of company (re)organization and project descoping that are hard to predict. These costs will be reflected in our company output, which may further affect Riot's income.
As with almost anything at this level of company operation, I don't believe this was a single person's decision or a single person's 'fault'. That doesn't mean I don't think it was a failure for the employees of Riot.
I believe it was a failure, on the part of company leadership, that this happened at all. I do not believe it is in the interest or to the benefit of Riot Games employees to decide on mass layoffs like this. Thus, I am disappointed.
Multiple incredible creative folks who I work with were laid off. People who made some of the more fundamental aspects of Riot Games creative output. That sucks.
A lot of other people who were less-publicly involved in the creative process (producers, PR, comms, designers) also got laid off. That also sucks. It's often harder to quantify or display the work that those people did within products, but they were also crucial members of the company who are now out of work. This, too, sucks shit.
Riot employees received the text of the layoff announcement at about the same time that it was published publicly. Given the nature of this information leaking (which is to say, it was certain to leak) this feels like a reasonable course of action to me.
Riot's severance package (the entirety of which was detailed in the layoff announcement) is better than I expected. Should have been even better, but it was better than what I expected.
It would have not been possible for Riot to have the income and/or recognizability that it does today without the workers that made the products that it is known for. Creating material at the scale that Riot does, like other AAA development, is complex, and it requires very skilled people doing very different things in concert.
It has been, and will continue to be, very difficult to work without approximately 11% of those people that were working at Riot last week.
