Riot Games cuts more employees, but says that the League of Legends Team will be "even larger" in the future

League of Legends studio Riot Games has announced another round of layoffs, while--somewhat counterintuitively--simultaneously promising that the League team will grow to be "even larger than it is today" in the future.

Riot cofounder Marc Merrill posted a message on X announcing the layoffs. Merrill said that Riot had "made changes to our teams and the way we work in order to ensure we can continue to improve the League experience for now and the long term."

Merrill wrote: "As part the changes, we have made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles." "This is not about reducing the headcount to save on costs--it's to ensure that we have the right expertise to continue to make League great for another 15 or more years." The League team will be bigger than it is now as we develop the new phase of League.

Merrill stated in a subsequent post that "success doesn't mean throwing more money or people at a problem," but rather, "it means having the right team and the right priorities and a sustainable way to deliver what players need."

Merrill wrote: "More resources won't solve the problem if we're solving it wrongly." It's not about building bigger, but smarter and healthier.

A Riot representative confirmed to PC Gamer that Riot is laying off 27 developers from League of Legends, as well as five people from its publishing business. Riot announced the cuts less than a month after it laid off 530 people and closed its Riot Forge, which was launched in 2019 for making singleplayer League of Legends with external studios.

CEO Dylan Jadeja stated at the time that Riot was "a company with a lack of focus" and that there were too many projects in progress that weren't paying dividends. He added that they made this decision not to please shareholders or to meet a quarterly earnings target, but because it was a necessity. It's the only way to maintain a focus on players over the long term.

Since the beginning of 2023 the videogame industry has laid-off thousands of developers, as the early days of Covid-19's "stay at home and game" have faded. In September 2024, studios such as Mountaintop, Airship Syndicate and Evening Star, Microsoft and Midnight Society, Lost Boys Interactive and Ballistic Moon, Rocksteady and Rocksteady made cuts. Hi-Rez Studios, Cryptic Studios and Hi-Rez Studios also laid off employees in October.