Riot Games reviews

4.0

75% would recommend to a friend

(1,043 total reviews)
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Dylan Jadeja

68% approve of CEO

54% positive business outlook

Riot Games has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 1,043 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Riot Games employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Mídia e comunicação industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
2.0
Jul 11, 2015

Rapid growth, rapid changes

Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

The folks I worked with were all crazy talented. Lots of perks. Early in my stay it was an incredibly energetic workplace filled with passionate people who just wanted to create kickass content.

Cons

Teams became bloated. Still, content output dwindled as the 'horizontal' culture rested at odds with the unchecked growth. What's left is the worst of both worlds -- any of the massive number of employees can grind production to a halt if they're loud enough, so you get huge teams working in bubbles -- distant enough to make maintaining visibility a serious issue, but oversized enough to make decision making a nightmare. The word 'initiative' is the most abused in Riot's vocabulary. Responsibility and recognition are not earned by being great at what you do, it's earned by loudly championing -something- whether it comes to fruition or not. Lots of politics, bureaucracy, and red tape. Important teams were having their bandwidth squandered by the aforementioned initiative owners all insisting their cause is worth working on. Lots of playing it safe content-wise. Unique ideas get pressed into molds so they can instead be grouped and bundled up according to the (coincidentally subjective) interpretation of 'data'. This is further complicated by Riot being a global company, making it very difficult to take risks. This one's personal, but unlimited PTO actually made it feel pretty bad taking time off. You don't accumulate it, so there's no real feeling of spending it and taking a break that you've verifiably earned. This made maintaining a healthy work-life balance a challenge for me. Because leadership and management responsibilities are essentially given out to whomever asks for them the loudest, career guidance was a problem. Getting any straight answers about how to progress and level up was remarkably difficult when I was actually stuck. Hilariously masturbatory company-or-team-wide e-mails and speeches about humility. Low investment in long-term growth or product health from an engineering/tools perspective (This probably isn't news). It seems that there's always some shiny new feature or initiative being chased instead. The desire to amass the industry's best talent and the apparent aversion to telling awesome people that they're being awesome is not a good mix. Creating awesome stuff on teams packed with talented people and then getting no recognition for it even at a team level became incredibly draining for me. All in all, it was an incredibly stressful place to work.

4.0
Jul 9, 2015
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Riot is an incredible place to work - you are surrounded by smart, passionate people who deeply care about the experience of players and who share an ambitious vision of making gaming better for gamers. Engineering really is trying to push game technology to the next level, and that is an incredibly rewarding challenge. Micromanaging is not really a thing at Riot - teams have the liberty to decide on how to meet their goals and are generally free to choose their own path. If you can handle the ambiguity that comes from having a goal without an externally-imposed instruction set, this is incredibly empowering. If you can't, you will fail. Benefits are pretty darn good - both in the form of standard benefits (health insurance, 401k matching, etc) and in the form of less standard perks (the new office occasionally feels like nerd Disneyland). The space we work in now is incredible, and the people who work to make sure we have a great place to work probably deserve even more praise than I can give them. The problems we work on are incredibly fun - the scale we need to support and the expected level of quality we need to hit mean that you have to stay on your toes and keep growing. If you are the kind of person who loves to rise to a challenge, and finds difficult problems their own reward, you will love this. If you aren't, Riot isn't for you.

Cons

Ear Flicks: * Riot is very loud, which can be disruptive to work. * Meeting culture can be kinda lax, which is annoying if you are not lax yourself. * Living in Los Angeles More Substantive Cons: * Riot is most certainly not for everyone - you have to be incredibly comfortable with ambiguity, capable of self-management, and able to handle your own growth. You will have management, but they will be hands-off. If you can handle that, you will succeed, but if you can't, you will fail. * There isn't enough middle-management to go around. Managers are overtaxed and have too many reports, which means that individuals own even more of their own careers than was perhaps intended. * Inter-group (particularly between teams and initiatives) trust seems low at times, which is weird, given that trust is one of the cornerstones of Riot's values. * Things get done slowly - not from lack of hard work or proper prioritization, but because the core technology we work with was not built to sustain the level or kind of use it actually has. Scaling out to support the massive number of players we need to support at the level we want to support them at makes even simple problems into hard problems. Efforts to pay down tech-debt and improve our base scalability continue to improve our iteration speed, but lots of work remains. This can be really disheartening, because players often feel that we aren't working hard enough, aren't working well enough, or just don't care about them, which is as far from the truth as you can get. For me, personally, nothing hurts more than feeling like the people we do this for aren't getting what they want. * Pay isn't great - it isn't horrible, but if Riot really wants to recruit Google level talent, we need to shell out Google level money - and we don't. Most of that is probably the inherent lower pay that people in the games industry receive, but that shouldn't be a constraint we accept. * You own your own work-life balance. That sounds like a pro, but for lots of Rioters, that just enables them to have terrible work-life balance and not correct it. Teams and management need to do a better job of setting the expectation of reasonable balance. * Living in Los Angeles... No, but seriously - LA is expensive as heck to live in and has infrastructure that seems like it hasn't improved since the 1950's. Riot is the only reason I am willing to live here.

2.0
Jul 9, 2015

Hard work for little pay

Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Fully stock kitchen, able to play games during the work day, free meals daily and other fun activities

Cons

Very very "clicky". If you're not part of a click, people talk rumors about you and look down on you.

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Glassdoor has 1,461 Riot Games reviews submitted anonymously by Riot Games employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Riot Games is right for you.