Pretty decent. When I was laid off last year from a company that supposedly has a reputation for taking care of their employees, I got 1 week per year of service, which was 8 weeks.
Yeah to be honest, a half-year sabbatical with time to job hunt non-frantically is a luxury I've never had. I love my current job, but I would probably look at a half year severance like a vacation.
Sorry for the intrusive question but if you make software engineer level salary how is it that you don't have multiple months/years saved to mitigate for those possible layoffs?
Or did we all fall for the lifestyle inflation trap that comes with high salaries?
I'm probably a pessimist/realist but I have always lived way below my income and saved as much as possible because it really feels like the cash cow that software engineering is is eventually going to end. Layoffs are always looming. When that day comes, I want to relax as much as possible and not have a deadline to find a job,
I got laid off and my "severance" was the minimum mandated WARN act period and "don't mail your stuff back to us." Of course, the layoff happened the month before equity vesting and annual bonus happened.
Did you look into unemployment benefits? I've never done this but I had acquaintances who looked forward to getting laid off because they'd get unemployment payments from the government for up to 6 months so they saw it as vacation. All they had to do was lie about looking for a job. This was quite a while ago so things might have changed.
PS: not saying you shouldn't have gotten a better severance package.
The layoff announcement mentioned that the 11% staff laid off is global. It's possible a lot of people laid off are actually in China, since Tencent owns 100% of Riot Games. There is a trend for Chinese companies to not hire workers that are over 35 years old, so some of these employees might be unemployed for a long time. Also, Chinese economy is in the crapper right now.
Most are fairly high cost living locations outside the US (ex: Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Paris, Dubai). Mumbai and Sao Paulo are not cheap for India and Brazil.
Every year Riot releases a new cinematic for League of Legends to celebrate the start of the season. Last year they released the worst cinematic in all of their history. This announcement makes me wonder if their sudden rapid growth was at least partially the reason for why they ended up shipping such a bad video.
In the last year Riot also started to sell severely overpriced skins, despite a lot of outrage from the community. With their lootbox system you basically only guaranteed certain skins if you spent like $200, which many players complained was inaccessible for them. Maybe this was a sign that financials were not in a great place for the company.
Is not being able to buy a skin some kind of tragedy? It's a luxury item at any price.
I'm sure there is a kid somewhere crying into his controller because he's been rejected by his online friends because he's using the default skin, but I think he's learning a valuable life lesson.
It's a potentially negative financial marker to the success of their business model of selling skins if their skins don't sell, I don't think there's any more sentiment to the statement beyond that
First watch the 2022 cinematic [0], to get an idea of what they normally ship. Then watch the 2023 cinematic [1], to see how badly they messed up. And just to drive the point home, compare it with the 2024 cinematic [2] which is a return to form.
If you look at the 2023 cinematic in a vacuum it might seem generic and uninspired, but then when you compare it with the 2022 and 2024 cinematics the quality gap becomes apparent.
> In the last year Riot also started to sell severely overpriced skins, despite a lot of outrage from the community.
They learned from Valorant. It has extremely overpriced skins from the beginning too, and the outrage lasts a single post on Reddit once every few months and is downvoted by fanboys. They just don't care, people will buy them anyway, most people will forget in a moment. I'm guessing they have data from Valorant that simply shows they make more if they just aim at whales. I doubt they would just raise prices without giving it a real thought.
> This means we’re eliminating about 530 roles globally, which represents around 11% of Rioters, with the biggest impact to teams outside of core development.
I wonder if it actually had to do more with esports pulling back quite a bit this last year. Riot was leaning into that pretty hard for League. That had to factor in for a large chunk of the headcount for layoffs.
I just can’t imagine they’re cash flow negative given how popular League and Valorant are, but maybe they’re seeing enough of a dip in their numbers that they’re trending in that direction.
If that's true, then this is the weaseliest way to express that:
> The adjustments we're making aim to focus us on the areas that have the greatest impact on your experience while reducing investment on things that don’t.
Not making payroll because you go cashflow negative makes Boards and C-suites tremble in fear because of the whole “piercing the corporate veil” concept that makes them personally liable for not making payroll.
So you layoff 10% to save the other 90%.
Because otherwise you’d have put 100% of your company out of a job + knock on effects to local economy, being sued, prosecuted for all sorts of things etc etc
It's absolutely wild how good Arcane is, especially considering League imo has the absolute worst aesthetic quality of any popular game. I'm glad they didn't let any of the art directors for the game (does the game even have art directors?) meddle with the show.
We know it has somebody with a foot fetish. Look at the footwear of all the female characters (at least the ones made before 2016, I haven't played it since then).
I did try to watch some recent games and while it looks like the gameplay itself has improved since then, the effect visuals have somehow managed to get even more blended and difficult to read. How do they manage to fail this badly at it for so long?
Closely related, but not a duplicate. This post explicitly calls out services and products that will continue to be supported, like world's, musical collaborations like KDA, the Arcane anime, and upcoming Project L.
Everyone overhired the last 3 years thinking the good times were forever. They’re probably overloaded with roles they don’t need anymore and have needs in other places so it really doesn’t make sense to keep folks.
I assume video-game sales went up during the stay-at-home pandemic years; with that now behind us, this isn’t surprising at all. In fact, I’m surprised this didn’t already happen a year ago.
> Everyone overhired the last 3 years thinking the good times were forever.
It's very convenient that this isn't measurable and if you asked anyone in the industry at the time they most likely would have said "We don't have nearly enough" people.
Readit News
It appears to be very heavily biased toward artists, so even if they start that job hunt today, it’s still going to be frantic.
Or did we all fall for the lifestyle inflation trap that comes with high salaries?
I'm probably a pessimist/realist but I have always lived way below my income and saved as much as possible because it really feels like the cash cow that software engineering is is eventually going to end. Layoffs are always looming. When that day comes, I want to relax as much as possible and not have a deadline to find a job,
PS: not saying you shouldn't have gotten a better severance package.
I feel bad for all these layoffs, but it seems the support system has improved drastically since then.
Most are fairly high cost living locations outside the US (ex: Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Paris, Dubai). Mumbai and Sao Paulo are not cheap for India and Brazil.
In the last year Riot also started to sell severely overpriced skins, despite a lot of outrage from the community. With their lootbox system you basically only guaranteed certain skins if you spent like $200, which many players complained was inaccessible for them. Maybe this was a sign that financials were not in a great place for the company.
I'm sure there is a kid somewhere crying into his controller because he's been rejected by his online friends because he's using the default skin, but I think he's learning a valuable life lesson.
First watch the 2022 cinematic [0], to get an idea of what they normally ship. Then watch the 2023 cinematic [1], to see how badly they messed up. And just to drive the point home, compare it with the 2024 cinematic [2] which is a return to form.
If you look at the 2023 cinematic in a vacuum it might seem generic and uninspired, but then when you compare it with the 2022 and 2024 cinematics the quality gap becomes apparent.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDYqT0_9VR4
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJT5d5Ue3ao
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHhqwBwmRkI
No comment on the other aspects but I suspect they are still printing money (comparing to Fortnite and Valve)
They learned from Valorant. It has extremely overpriced skins from the beginning too, and the outrage lasts a single post on Reddit once every few months and is downvoted by fanboys. They just don't care, people will buy them anyway, most people will forget in a moment. I'm guessing they have data from Valorant that simply shows they make more if they just aim at whales. I doubt they would just raise prices without giving it a real thought.
> This means we’re eliminating about 530 roles globally, which represents around 11% of Rioters, with the biggest impact to teams outside of core development.
They don't seem to explain in any way why it's a necessity.
I just can’t imagine they’re cash flow negative given how popular League and Valorant are, but maybe they’re seeing enough of a dip in their numbers that they’re trending in that direction.
> The adjustments we're making aim to focus us on the areas that have the greatest impact on your experience while reducing investment on things that don’t.
And why is that bad? Because once you run out of money everything is cooked
So you layoff 10% to save the other 90%.
Because otherwise you’d have put 100% of your company out of a job + knock on effects to local economy, being sued, prosecuted for all sorts of things etc etc
We know it has somebody with a foot fetish. Look at the footwear of all the female characters (at least the ones made before 2016, I haven't played it since then).
I did try to watch some recent games and while it looks like the gameplay itself has improved since then, the effect visuals have somehow managed to get even more blended and difficult to read. How do they manage to fail this badly at it for so long?
Were they just too far in with contracts at that point to duck out?
I smell BS
It's very convenient that this isn't measurable and if you asked anyone in the industry at the time they most likely would have said "We don't have nearly enough" people.