Former Employee - Anonymous Employee in Los Angeles, CA
Former Employee - Anonymous Employee in Los Angeles, CA
Doesn't Recommend
Neutral Outlook
Disapproves of CEO
I worked at Riot Games full-time (More than 5 years)
Pros
- Amazing cafeteria and campus. You won't want to go home.
- Open PTO policy. No need to feel bad about taking PTO for sick days!
- There are some VERY good people here and you'll make lifelong friends.
- There are many resources available to you if you're interested in learning. I've never known a company so focused on education!
Cons
I'm echoing everything else that has been said in other negative reviews. It's a sad and sobering fact that none of them are overly dramatic. This place is extremely toxic.
- "Bro culture" and harassment run rampant and pervades leadership. You know those Uber stories going around recently? Riot is a half-step down from those experiences. Your clout and stability are directly proportional to the state of your abs (I'm only somewhat kidding about this). Leadership is filled with privileged men who do not recognize their own privilege and destructively wield their lack of awareness.
- In order to be successful at Riot you have to do one of two things: 1) deal with an absurd amount of nonsense (this is the majority of Rioters) or 2) play the political game of backstabbing, befriending the right people, and focusing on presentation rather than results or expertise. Nepotism is your friend. It is incredible how many incompetent, unproven people have risen their ways through the ranks just from smooth talking and agreeing with the people around them.
- Senior leadership is the layer of cancer that infects the rest of the company. More and more "mercenaries" are being hired who are looking to not do much and take a lot of credit. There's an obliviousness/naivety to these kinds of mercenaries from leadership (yet obvious to everyone else), and they're always surprised when one leaves the company for more money somewhere else. Some have stayed long-term since they've discovered there isn't a lot of hard work to be done. All they have to do is ask some "powerful questions" to cast the illusion that they're adding value.
- As progressive as Riot is in its employee policies, HR remains the same as every other company out there. They will not help you. They will only help the company. Do not bother bringing to their attention the problems you've experienced; they'll just run you around conducting interviews and not actually address the issue, especially if you have a grievance towards one specific person and that person has a powerful manager.
- Practicing what you preach is not followed at Riot. Leadership loves to say that it's on you to call out bad people, experiences, people who are "misaligned", etc, but god forbid you challenge a leader when they're being hypocritical or doing a bad job. Your career at Riot will end if you rock the boat, even when it's clearly coming from a good place (like being player-focused). If you're perceived as "complaining" about an issue, you're done (doubly so if you're a woman). Leadership is void of empathy and loves to spin everything so that you're part of the problem when you bring something up. Phrases like, "Why don't you do something about it?" "Is this the appropriate way to bring it up?" are thrown at Rioters when they appropriately call out red flags, ignoring the facts that they have already taken the right steps or them calling it out IS doing something because they don't realistically have the power to affect it.
This also relates to the privilege part I wrote out above: leadership sings about merit and disregards any real struggles people have when the odds are stacked against them. They fail to recognize that people don't "rise to the challenge" in their eyes because they have made it a hostile, unsafe environment to do so, or that issues like sexism make it impossible for people to tackle problems.
- "Misaligned" is a word thrown around by leadership to easily fire people, which really just translates to: "They hurt my fragile ego and I have more power than them so I'll abuse it right now."
- Diversity is not taken seriously. There is a diversity initiative, but the truth is leadership is not empathetic of diversity and doesn't fully internalize the positives of hiring minorities. They fall into the misguided attitudes of, "More minorities should just apply" without, again, recognizing that maybe minorities don't want to for good reason.
- If you're a woman who is looking to succeed, you're expected to act like a type-A man yet you cannot be TOO loud. The line is extremely fuzzy, so it's easier to err on the side of a female "yes man." It was commonplace to find that feedback included gender-based slurs for women, but not for men.
- An open feedback culture is encouraged but you cannot give negative feedback to certain people or you will be shown the door. They will ignore the fact that the negative feedback you give is actually constructive and intending to improve the company, but you will be painted as a negative person yourself. It's a very simple, easy defense tactic from higher-ups, and it's employed frequently. Fragile egos, again. Witch hunts are common. Prepare to be called "difficult to work with" if you give constructive feedback to the wrong people.
- It takes forever to get anything done. Trust is not widely available and there are too many stakeholders at any given point, so don't expect to come out of this job with a resume with tangible deliverables.
- You'll be brainwashed to ignore all of these issues. If you can give into that, I envy you to a small degree.
Advice to Management
You hired too many bad seeds too high up and transformed the company to be an ego-filled, land-grabbing, political environment. It's been suggested many times that you need to re-evaluate your senior leadership yet there hasn't been any significant change in the past four or five years. I will suggest it again.
Get rid of meritocracy-speech because it blatantly isn't true. It would be one thing if Riot recognized it was a political battlefield and accepted it, but telling Rioters that there's an open feedback culture when there clearly isn't is disingenuous and sets people up to fail. You bring in all of these people who believe in the Riot vision but it's quickly apparent that it's just a facade.
My biggest confusion that I'd like to see resolved: what do you want to be? Do you actually want to have a healthy culture and a safe environment? Do you want people to treat this as more than a job? Because from what I've seen, those who try to change Riot for the better, those who have poured their true hearts and souls into this company and its people, are the ones punished. For years now the easiest things to act on (for example, removing politicians and doing some deep introspection at a high level) have been ignored and it seems like Riot enjoys being a ruthless, mental health-draining place under the guise of meritocracy.
Take feedback seriously. Challenge yourself to be better. There are too many people at Riot who are scared of doing and saying the right thing because their paycheck-to-paycheck life is on the line and now they're held hostage. Riot has so much power and resources; you could truly be the best place in the world to work if you just got a little uncomfortable and vulnerable. But I guess those Fortune articles are enough to let you sleep at night.
I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. I lead Diversity and Inclusion at Riot and I’m also part of a new team that shapes and reinforces our company culture . What you experienced deeply concerns me, and I would love to know how I can help address the problems you’ve raised as they’re antithetical to the environment we try to build. With your help, we can tackle the right issues and create more positive experiences.
If you’re comfortable reaching out, I want to make time to chat about your specific experiences so my team can understand better how we can improve. Please contact me anytime at selsabaawi@riotgames.com.
I worked at Riot Games full-time (More than a year)
Pros
Open PTO Amazing health benefits Perks like free food, massages, and activities Brilliant coworkers (for the most part) Casual workspace Nice peripherals Low barrier to interacting with the incredible player community
Cons
Riot is a great place for a first job, if you're fresh out of college or an internship. The maturity level of the organization is pretty low, and the campus feels more like a fraternity than a workplace, complete with hazing rituals, a really creepy pressure to have your peers be your main social circle despite having a life outside of work, and sexual harassment galore. For seasoned professionals it's a guaranteed way to take three steps back in your career. I'm all for a chill work space, but there's a difference between understanding that jeans and cuss words don't affect quality of work, and allowing people to get away with playing 35 hours of video games a week at their desks and somehow still claiming to "add value."
The company mantra "default to trust" does not mean people will respect your expertise, it means you're not allowed to be offended when your insight is constantly dismissed and you are relegated to an entry-level workload despite a decade, or more, of experience.
Expect many company mantras to be weaponized in this way, especially if you are a woman. Again with "default to trust" -- it means if you are treated unfairly or poorly, it's YOUR responsibility to accept that the offender "probably didn't mean it" instead of, I dunno, trusting that the person reporting bad behavior probably has the mental capacity to figure out whether someone "meant it" or not?
"Open feedback culture" means you can only give constructive criticism that "feels good." You've got to make the other person feel like a hero for accepting and overcoming whatever shortcoming you're addressing. Unless, of course, that feedback is directed at something that is foundational to Riot as a company. There's an imaginary line you cross when you give feedback on the culture itself. Suddenly you are no longer a culture fit -- because Riot can't possibly be fostering toxic behavior. It is never Riot's fault. Ever. If you don't like something Riot is doing, you don't "get it" and you are the problem. It's honestly the perfect breeding ground for predators.
They won't fire you for this, oh no that would not fit the hip narrative pushed by the Brand team. They'll just tuck you in a corner and make your life so miserable you'll decide to leave yourself. Maybe they'll "strongly suggest" that you consider whether you are "aligned" and that you may be successful elsewhere.
You can get away with anything if you're charming enough to talk your way out of it. Meritocracy? More like Mediocrity. There are SO MANY managers with NO experience managing people. Managers whose teams are floundering because they're so inexperienced, they offer nothing in terms of guidance. Managers who openly admit they shouldn't be managing people. And why do these people stay managers? Because they're friends with the right people. Because they talk in circles. Because, honestly, at this point, firing all the useless managers would look really, really bad. I don't think Riot is ignorant that they've let the most incompetent/manipulative people rise up to lead their company -- I think they realize openly admitting it would be a PR nightmare.
And what would that do to the organization as a whole? HA, that was a joke. There is no organization. Your team will be reorganized every couple months. Your manager will change frequently. Sometimes your manager won't even know they're your manager. Sometimes you'll get a random dude as a manager "because he was bored." Multiple teams will be made to work on the same project and they won't even realize the other exists. Titles may not have anything to do with anything you're working on. Good luck getting that Director-level marketing job at your dream company when, despite multiple decades of work experience and successful campaigns, your resume is questioned because your Riot years have you listed as a mere "media specialist" or some other nonsense.
Riot has some of the most brilliant, passionate minds trapped within its walls. Most of the people are amazing, they're just stuck in a mediocre system that barely keeps itself running. And they're burnt out from carrying the slack of the duds who don't actually do anything special but SWEAR they are visionaries.
Advice to Management
My advice? Let people do the actual jobs you HIRED THEM FOR. Listen to people more experienced than you. Stop trying to reinvent every single wheel--sometimes problems have already been solved! Fire terrible managers. Listen to your regional teams because if you think your campaigns have any kind of universal appeal you are DELUSIONAL. People in Brazil, people in Turkey, people in Ireland don't care about the same things in the same way as Americans do. That's the whole point of regional offices.
Last but certainly not least, stop being in denial about your sexism problem. You're honestly standing at the precipice of an Uber-level fiasco. The lack of self awareness you have about this should be humiliating, to be honest. Women, please come forward with your stories. You shouldn't be relegated to teary-eyed 1on1s, fearing that you're alone (I wish I could accurately express the horror of how many of these I had with various women in just a few years there). They can brush one story under the rug--it's much harder to brush one hundred of them.
You shared some troubling feedback and we would welcome the opportunity to ask more detail about your experience at Riot. If you're open to providing more specifics so that we can follow-up with the appropriate team(s), please contact me directly at mcullen@riotgames.com.... MoreLess
Riot Games
Employee Review
Employee Review
Helpful (111)
"Bro culture at its worst"
I worked at Riot Games full-time (More than 5 years)
Pros
- Amazing cafeteria and campus. You won't want to go home.
- Open PTO policy. No need to feel bad about taking PTO for sick days!
- There are some VERY good people here and you'll make lifelong friends.
- There are many resources available to you if you're interested in learning. I've never known a company so focused on education!
Cons
I'm echoing everything else that has been said in other negative reviews. It's a sad and sobering fact that none of them are overly dramatic. This place is extremely toxic.
- "Bro culture" and harassment run rampant and pervades leadership. You know those Uber stories going around recently? Riot is a half-step down from those experiences. Your clout and stability are directly proportional to the state of your abs (I'm only somewhat kidding about this). Leadership is filled with privileged men who do not recognize their own privilege and destructively wield their lack of awareness.
- In order to be successful at Riot you have to do one of two things: 1) deal with an absurd amount of nonsense (this is the majority of Rioters) or 2) play the political game of backstabbing, befriending the right people, and focusing on presentation rather than results or expertise. Nepotism is your friend. It is incredible how many incompetent, unproven people have risen their ways through the ranks just from smooth talking and agreeing with the people around them.
- Senior leadership is the layer of cancer that infects the rest of the company. More and more "mercenaries" are being hired who are looking to not do much and take a lot of credit. There's an obliviousness/naivety to these kinds of mercenaries from leadership (yet obvious to everyone else), and they're always surprised when one leaves the company for more money somewhere else. Some have stayed long-term since they've discovered there isn't a lot of hard work to be done. All they have to do is ask some "powerful questions" to cast the illusion that they're adding value.
- As progressive as Riot is in its employee policies, HR remains the same as every other company out there. They will not help you. They will only help the company. Do not bother bringing to their attention the problems you've experienced; they'll just run you around conducting interviews and not actually address the issue, especially if you have a grievance towards one specific person and that person has a powerful manager.
- Practicing what you preach is not followed at Riot. Leadership loves to say that it's on you to call out bad people, experiences, people who are "misaligned", etc, but god forbid you challenge a leader when they're being hypocritical or doing a bad job. Your career at Riot will end if you rock the boat, even when it's clearly coming from a good place (like being player-focused). If you're perceived as "complaining" about an issue, you're done (doubly so if you're a woman). Leadership is void of empathy and loves to spin everything so that you're part of the problem when you bring something up. Phrases like, "Why don't you do something about it?" "Is this the appropriate way to bring it up?" are thrown at Rioters when they appropriately call out red flags, ignoring the facts that they have already taken the right steps or them calling it out IS doing something because they don't realistically have the power to affect it.
This also relates to the privilege part I wrote out above: leadership sings about merit and disregards any real struggles people have when the odds are stacked against them. They fail to recognize that people don't "rise to the challenge" in their eyes because they have made it a hostile, unsafe environment to do so, or that issues like sexism make it impossible for people to tackle problems.
- "Misaligned" is a word thrown around by leadership to easily fire people, which really just translates to: "They hurt my fragile ego and I have more power than them so I'll abuse it right now."
- Diversity is not taken seriously. There is a diversity initiative, but the truth is leadership is not empathetic of diversity and doesn't fully internalize the positives of hiring minorities. They fall into the misguided attitudes of, "More minorities should just apply" without, again, recognizing that maybe minorities don't want to for good reason.
- If you're a woman who is looking to succeed, you're expected to act like a type-A man yet you cannot be TOO loud. The line is extremely fuzzy, so it's easier to err on the side of a female "yes man." It was commonplace to find that feedback included gender-based slurs for women, but not for men.
- An open feedback culture is encouraged but you cannot give negative feedback to certain people or you will be shown the door. They will ignore the fact that the negative feedback you give is actually constructive and intending to improve the company, but you will be painted as a negative person yourself. It's a very simple, easy defense tactic from higher-ups, and it's employed frequently. Fragile egos, again. Witch hunts are common. Prepare to be called "difficult to work with" if you give constructive feedback to the wrong people.
- It takes forever to get anything done. Trust is not widely available and there are too many stakeholders at any given point, so don't expect to come out of this job with a resume with tangible deliverables.
- You'll be brainwashed to ignore all of these issues. If you can give into that, I envy you to a small degree.
Advice to Management
You hired too many bad seeds too high up and transformed the company to be an ego-filled, land-grabbing, political environment. It's been suggested many times that you need to re-evaluate your senior leadership yet there hasn't been any significant change in the past four or five years. I will suggest it again.
Get rid of meritocracy-speech because it blatantly isn't true. It would be one thing if Riot recognized it was a political battlefield and accepted it, but telling Rioters that there's an open feedback culture when there clearly isn't is disingenuous and sets people up to fail. You bring in all of these people who believe in the Riot vision but it's quickly apparent that it's just a facade.
My biggest confusion that I'd like to see resolved: what do you want to be? Do you actually want to have a healthy culture and a safe environment? Do you want people to treat this as more than a job? Because from what I've seen, those who try to change Riot for the better, those who have poured their true hearts and souls into this company and its people, are the ones punished. For years now the easiest things to act on (for example, removing politicians and doing some deep introspection at a high level) have been ignored and it seems like Riot enjoys being a ruthless, mental health-draining place under the guise of meritocracy.
Take feedback seriously. Challenge yourself to be better. There are too many people at Riot who are scared of doing and saying the right thing because their paycheck-to-paycheck life is on the line and now they're held hostage. Riot has so much power and resources; you could truly be the best place in the world to work if you just got a little uncomfortable and vulnerable. But I guess those Fortune articles are enough to let you sleep at night.
Riot Games Response
Mar 17, 2017 – Manager of Diversity & Inclusion
Hey there,
I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. I lead Diversity and Inclusion at Riot and I’m also part of a new team that shapes and reinforces our company culture . What you experienced deeply concerns me, and I would love to know how I can help address the problems you’ve raised as they’re antithetical to the environment we try to build. With your help, we can tackle the right issues and create more positive experiences.
If you’re comfortable reaching out, I want to make time to chat about your specific experiences so my team can understand better how we can improve. Please contact me anytime at selsabaawi@riotgames.com.
Thanks,
Soha El-Sabaawi... MoreLess
Other Employee Reviews
Other Employee Reviews
"great people, bit disorganized"
I worked at Riot Games as a contractor
Pros
great people, budgets not a problem. Fun environment.
Cons
maybe too much creative freedom, inefficiency leads to crushing deadlines.
Advice to Management
make up your mind and do it
Riot Games Response
seconds ago
Edit • DeleteHelpful (36)
"Bait and Switch"
I worked at Riot Games full-time (More than a year)
Pros
Open PTO
Amazing health benefits
Perks like free food, massages, and activities
Brilliant coworkers (for the most part)
Casual workspace
Nice peripherals
Low barrier to interacting with the incredible player community
Cons
Riot is a great place for a first job, if you're fresh out of college or an internship. The maturity level of the organization is pretty low, and the campus feels more like a fraternity than a workplace, complete with hazing rituals, a really creepy pressure to have your peers be your main social circle despite having a life outside of work, and sexual harassment galore. For seasoned professionals it's a guaranteed way to take three steps back in your career. I'm all for a chill work space, but there's a difference between understanding that jeans and cuss words don't affect quality of work, and allowing people to get away with playing 35 hours of video games a week at their desks and somehow still claiming to "add value."
The company mantra "default to trust" does not mean people will respect your expertise, it means you're not allowed to be offended when your insight is constantly dismissed and you are relegated to an entry-level workload despite a decade, or more, of experience.
Expect many company mantras to be weaponized in this way, especially if you are a woman. Again with "default to trust" -- it means if you are treated unfairly or poorly, it's YOUR responsibility to accept that the offender "probably didn't mean it" instead of, I dunno, trusting that the person reporting bad behavior probably has the mental capacity to figure out whether someone "meant it" or not?
"Open feedback culture" means you can only give constructive criticism that "feels good." You've got to make the other person feel like a hero for accepting and overcoming whatever shortcoming you're addressing. Unless, of course, that feedback is directed at something that is foundational to Riot as a company. There's an imaginary line you cross when you give feedback on the culture itself. Suddenly you are no longer a culture fit -- because Riot can't possibly be fostering toxic behavior. It is never Riot's fault. Ever. If you don't like something Riot is doing, you don't "get it" and you are the problem. It's honestly the perfect breeding ground for predators.
They won't fire you for this, oh no that would not fit the hip narrative pushed by the Brand team. They'll just tuck you in a corner and make your life so miserable you'll decide to leave yourself. Maybe they'll "strongly suggest" that you consider whether you are "aligned" and that you may be successful elsewhere.
You can get away with anything if you're charming enough to talk your way out of it. Meritocracy? More like Mediocrity. There are SO MANY managers with NO experience managing people. Managers whose teams are floundering because they're so inexperienced, they offer nothing in terms of guidance. Managers who openly admit they shouldn't be managing people. And why do these people stay managers? Because they're friends with the right people. Because they talk in circles. Because, honestly, at this point, firing all the useless managers would look really, really bad. I don't think Riot is ignorant that they've let the most incompetent/manipulative people rise up to lead their company -- I think they realize openly admitting it would be a PR nightmare.
And what would that do to the organization as a whole? HA, that was a joke. There is no organization. Your team will be reorganized every couple months. Your manager will change frequently. Sometimes your manager won't even know they're your manager. Sometimes you'll get a random dude as a manager "because he was bored." Multiple teams will be made to work on the same project and they won't even realize the other exists. Titles may not have anything to do with anything you're working on. Good luck getting that Director-level marketing job at your dream company when, despite multiple decades of work experience and successful campaigns, your resume is questioned because your Riot years have you listed as a mere "media specialist" or some other nonsense.
Riot has some of the most brilliant, passionate minds trapped within its walls. Most of the people are amazing, they're just stuck in a mediocre system that barely keeps itself running. And they're burnt out from carrying the slack of the duds who don't actually do anything special but SWEAR they are visionaries.
Advice to Management
My advice? Let people do the actual jobs you HIRED THEM FOR. Listen to people more experienced than you. Stop trying to reinvent every single wheel--sometimes problems have already been solved! Fire terrible managers. Listen to your regional teams because if you think your campaigns have any kind of universal appeal you are DELUSIONAL. People in Brazil, people in Turkey, people in Ireland don't care about the same things in the same way as Americans do. That's the whole point of regional offices.
Last but certainly not least, stop being in denial about your sexism problem. You're honestly standing at the precipice of an Uber-level fiasco. The lack of self awareness you have about this should be humiliating, to be honest. Women, please come forward with your stories. You shouldn't be relegated to teary-eyed 1on1s, fearing that you're alone (I wish I could accurately express the horror of how many of these I had with various women in just a few years there). They can brush one story under the rug--it's much harder to brush one hundred of them.
Riot Games Response
Aug 15, 2017 – Talent Lead
You shared some troubling feedback and we would welcome the opportunity to ask more detail about your experience at Riot. If you're open to providing more specifics so that we can follow-up with the appropriate team(s), please contact me directly at mcullen@riotgames.com.... MoreLess
Discover more reviews about Riot Games.
Work at Riot Games? Share Your Experiences