Superman's Dead
After a year of unending job losses, Riot's layoffs hit especially hard
Before I get going, I almost didn’t write this update for a few reasons:
I haven’t worked at Riot in six years and have no real insight into its inner workings anymore.
Pieces like this are almost always for the benefit of the writer, not the reader.
It’s my birthday and there’s way better ways to spend my time as I enter my 40s.
But here I am. Partially because I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about Riot’s layoffs, partially because the ex-Rioters I’ve talked to since the layoffs were announced have all expressed the same emotions - alienation, confusion, and ultimately a resigned sensation of inevitability. So I write this to hopefully answer some questions: Why did this feel so different? Why does this feel worse than my own layoff last year?
Triumph and Trauma
Riot’s culture lends itself very well to nostalgia. A story I’ve told often is when I was interviewing there in 2011, I asked Marc, the president of the company at the time, where all this “player value” shit really ended and people started looking at financial metrics. His answer was it didn’t end; if we make cool shit and listen to players, they’ll reward us. That’s when I decided I wanted the job. It was a rare chance to pick up the blue lightsaber.
That player-focused culture had its intoxicating points. We were on a mission to change the game industry. To prove a company could make money with a free game by putting players' needs first and making the product better every day. And it was working. We were making Cool Shit and players were Rewarding Us. We were the good guys and we were winning.
Nostalgia, though, is a fond remembrance of past pain, and Riot’s darker side caused a lot of pain. The well-documented mistreatment of women at the company. The libertarian entrepreneurial spirit that demonized management so much that at least one career manager had 40 direct reports for an entire year. The divergent, often mercurial accountability structures that protected some horrible people. We were winning at a very high human cost.*
That dichotomy - the triumph and the trauma - is what makes Riot stick to your ribs.
When ex-Rioters get together after a while, there’s a weird bond we share. We all rode a dysfunctional rocket ship together because we all believed that Riot’s mission to be the most player-focused game company in the world was achievable and noble - the trauma just made us all really weird siblings.
I think what made these layoffs hit so hard is it feels like someone fucked with the family.
When 530 people, most of whom I haven’t met, get kicked out of the family due to what leadership admits were their bad decisions, it feels like a betrayal of the people that embarked on that mission and raises some questions: Was it all worth it? Was it all real?
It’s hard to put aside the doublespeak in the announcement. We made some bad calls, so we’re laying off what appears to be primarily junior- and mid-level employees who didn’t contibute to the decisions that got us here. Our parent company made $6B in profit last quarter but the ~$100MM we’d be paying these people over the next year is so unsustainable we’re going to pay ~$75MM to make them all go away now. You’re fucking with the family and the reasoning doesn’t add up.
Saying one thing and doing another isn’t new at Riot or anywhere else in the world, but it makes you view the triumph and the trauma in a new light: Triumph is fleeting, trauma is forever.
If there’s advice I can give to the folks who were let go this week, it’s this: Even if we haven’t met, we’re family. Family takes care of each other. We’ll be here long after Riot isn’t.
-J
*(In the company’s defense there were many attempts made, some successful, to improve this. Over my time there I stopped working 80-hour weeks, had some great managers, and the company kinda settled into a work-life expectation that was at least predictable. On balance I consider my time there to have been rewarding but I’m a cis-het white dude.)