Riot Games Reviews

Cons

Dont have any significant downside

Cons

Bro culture
Talent (HR) / Riot doesn't protect against retaliation / harassment
COO w confirmed harassment gets 2 months w/o pay
Very difficult to get salary increase / promotion. You work the title for a year first, with no actual path for promotion.
Company promotes silence after harassment expose

Cons

Open floor plan allows for many interruptions.

Cons

Different teams, equals very different experiences.
Lack of clear communication about expectations.

Cons

As part of Riot's "feedback culture", you are expected to call out things that are wrong. So you do, over and over and over, until tiredness runs through your very marrow. The trick is, no one is actually expected to do anything about it.

- Yes, there is some very ingrained sexism.
- Management is a mess, training is completely inconsistent. I had some very amazing managers and some very poor ones.
- Career paths and levels are sketchily defined in most disciplines. Programming and art are the exception. Disclipline leadership is aware but nothing was fixed over multiple years.
- Leadership interference and absurdly high standards make shipping R&D projects far more difficult than it should be
- West LA traffic

Cons

Absolutely zero integrity when it comes to consistent management of people. The promise of cultural change has been mostly lip service to check a few boxes. Many senior leaders call the Kotaku article "blown out of proportion" or "just a case of a few bad managers." I assure you this is not the case but no one wants to admit the problem is in their house. Discussions of how people are feeling have been all but squelched by a "no rumor milling, no discussions of the lawsuit" gag order instituted by the CEO. Hilariously the studio decided a 2 month holiday vacation was the appropriate response to a COO who has made many feel excluded, uncomfortable and harassed. The takeaway? As long as you perform well in your role it doesn't matter how you treated Rioters 4 years ago. Not acceptable. Our new heros are people who write up a set of fluffy meaningless values. Seriously Riot? We deserve better than cheesy lines like "dream big" and "thrive together." The trainings that have been rolled out in order to get at our cultural issues have been massive wastes of time which have led to zero change in the day to day experience of working at the studio. It is sad to see such a great studio turn to this.

Cons

I would say Riot's biggest fault is that many career growth paths are not well defined. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that Riot strives to hire very talented, ambitious people. It's not quite as much of a struggle for the mature disciplines at Riot, such as Technology and Art. Those are large segments of the overall org, but there are many disciplines that need to catch up on this front. On the plus side, Riot has identified this as an area for vast improvement and is taking organization-spanning steps to improve it. I'm excited to see the fruits of those efforts.

Cons

No possibility of cross training
Understaffed

Cons

Riot made some impressive breakthroughs in early days. (Game as a service, esports, talent-focused value). Sadly, like many successful companies that failed (Blackberry, Nokia), Riot leadership team builds up a big ego and hasn’t been humble and lived up to the manifestos. Bad management, silo teams with overlapping responsibilities, one of the worst compensation system as such a sizable company, inexperienced and bro mgmt team (D20). A CEO who never manages a company, a CTO who didn’t understand work place is not ur frat

There are always plenty of excuses not to try new things. Fears of failure result in no new games after so many years and countless missed opportunities. Just because you don’t know how to do it or you are afraid to fail is not the reason to stop new ideas. No strategy nor vision because the management team doesn’t know how to do it and never did it before. (First time! ).

Companies who can’t continue inventing and being humble always fail. Riot is going on that path with the current leadership team.

Cons

Riot hires talented individuals and fails to let them do their jobs. They discriminate against women and damage careers.

Riot also terminates people when they speak out against incompetent management, and they have a track record of using the latter against employees by calling out “performance issues” with no documentation.

If employees communicate feeling unsafe to HR (“Talent”), Talent will do whatever they can to out you. No one is “safe” and they’ll work hard to push you out.