Riot Games reviews

Rampant nepotism People who have no business being in the positions that they're in, and can hardly do the bare minimum of what's required from them Poor organization

Lack of development experience at the top and bleeds down to the bottom. League was a massive success great timing ect. But the industry and times change as does development. Riot overall has a culture where they will bring in very high end talent then disregard everything they bring to help increase productivity and move titles to Ship. The League team functions differently the the other dev teams because its a living product however that has to ship. Ya gotta keep the lights on basically. Sadly riot is far more concerned with how you say things rather then work or action. At times it felt like the company would rather spend millions, and I mean millions of dollars to avoid a few difficult conversations and terminations. The current management strategy seems to be to throw money at the problem. The issue with this is that all good things come to an end and if you can't make a new product then having the studio in one of the most expensive areas in the United States starts to be a big problem. Following that another con is the location of the studio at least in California. Santa Monica is sky high in living cost. Expect to pay between 2-5k a month depending on your family size. Otherwise expect to drive 2-3 hours into work. I've had on multiple occasions been told by junior artists that changing the workflow was too hard and they where fine with working slowly. Even if that meant a massive increase dev cost or even worse their co-workers had to work more because of it. The mid management seems to be the biggest issue there. I've seen managers actively fire people who they thought that person was a threat to their job or go out of their to manage them out. This happens regularly to higher end employees, I'd suspect because of intimidation. Promoting people who should not be in high level roles seems to be the normal, especially on the RnD teams. Artists that claim others work get promoted to leads while actually good strong devs who knows what they are doing are forced out because frankly there is a large amount of people who don't realize that game development is a job. Its not a playground.