Los Angeles-based game developer Riot Games is laying off about 530 employees, or roughly 11% of its total headcount.
The move, announced Monday, comes as Riot is planning to open its new Mercer Island location, the 156,000-square-foot Mercer Park Workplace. Riot bought the space, the former Famers Insurance property at 3003 77th Ave. SE, for $114.1 million in 2021 and planned to open it early this year.
A Riot spokesperson said the company wasn't commenting beyond a note CEO Dylan Jadeja sent to employees and was shared on the company's website. The spokesperson didn't say how many Seattle-area employees will be impacted by the cuts or how many will remain afterward.
"Since 2019, we’ve made a number of big bets across the company with the goal of making it better to be a player," Jadeja said in the note. "Today, we’re a company without a sharp enough focus, and simply put, we have too many things underway. Some of the significant investments we’ve made aren’t paying off the way we expected them to. Our costs have grown to the point where they’re unsustainable."
Founded in 2006, Riot is behind popular games like League of Legends and Valorant. Chinese conglomerate Tencent took a majority stake in the company in 2011 and acquired full control in 2015.
Jadeja said the company is making the cuts despite existing efforts to control its costs, and the layoffs are mostly outside of core development. Laid-off employees will get at least six months of severance, a cash bonus, health benefits and other benefits. Jadeja also said in the email employees should cancel normal meetings over the next few days and work from home through Wednesday.
Riot is reducing the size of the team on its Legends of Runeterra online card game and shifting its focus, as the game "hasn't performed as well as we need it to," Jadeja said, and the company had been subsidizing its costs through other games. It's also sunsetting its Riot Forge series after an upcoming release.
When Riot first bought its Mercer Island offices in 2021, it planned to have more than 400 employees there eventually. The company at the time had about 50 employees based in Bellevue, but needed a larger space to accommodate its growing workforce in the area. According to its LinkedIn page, Riot has about 330 employees based in the region.
"We know we want to have a presence in the Seattle area in order to attract the kind of talent we need in order to reach our ambitions," John Doyle, former chief operating officer of Riot's games business, said at the time. "We're going to be here for the foreseeable future."
Doyle is now a vice president at PlayStation, according to his LinkedIn page.
