[STEAM] Riot Lays off More League of Legends Developers While Promising to Increase Team Size

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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

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, 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," Merill continued. "For Rioters who are ***** 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 *******."



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)

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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.

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that 32 employees were impacted across League of Legends development team and Riot's publishing team.

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

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, 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

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, this puts the number of ***** off game developers this year alone at over 13,000, with over 10,000 ***** off in 2023 and over 8,000 in 2022. We wrote about

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have impacted developers

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.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].

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