Squandering Opportunities - Anonymous employee Riot Games Employee Review

2.0
Jul 22, 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The work we do at Riot never gets dull. There are tons of amazing challenges and plenty of work for you to reach out and take. You can try new strategies and innovate on existing work. I would love to hire people who work at Riot for other companies as they are forced to innovate and push boundaries regularly. A majority of the company really cares about League, and it is great that everyone has high empathy for our players, as we are players ourselves. The perks are genuinely outstanding and I haven't seen better in another game company.

Cons

Over time, Riot has started dramatically sliding into a downward trajectory due to our explosive growth. Long gone are the days where everyone worked hard together and strive to provide tangible results towards player value. There are still pockets where this exists, but are more of the exception than the rule. Friendships, nepotism, and saying the right thing in meetings are now far more important to career growth than anything else. There is a major focus on bringing in new people who are considered awesome with only scattered emphasis on giving people opportunities to grow themselves. Some of those same awesome people then leave within 6 months. Taking on new projects and demonstrating results there are often looked upon negatively if you don't execute them flawlessly. We have become super risk adverse and are so afraid of making a mistake many people sit in paralysis. We constantly pat ourselves on the back and say how awesome we are and then remind ourselves to be humble in our awesomeness. There certainly is lots of awesome stuff we do, but there is a ton of dead weight and very little real humility. We are proud of our feedback culture, and how open and trasparent we are. For some parts of Riot that is really true and those people are very lucky. For other parts, people live in fear of leaving real feedback for fear of retaliation. We are in the middle of our review process and it is almost all anonymous due to that fear. These problems are more significant for women at Riot, because they routinely seem to get the short end of the stick. Double standards, worse pay, higher expectations and faster to be exited. If you are a smooth talker and want what is probably a safe and interesting job for years to come, I would highly recommend Riot. If you want to be valued by your results, and paid a comparable amount to other companies in Santa Monica, pick somewhere else.

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Jun 14, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Great teams and space to work in

Cons

A lot of overhead in organization

4.0
Jun 1, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Player focus, some of the coolest games on the planet, Riot does a great job of creating an environment where people can succeed and thrive

Cons

Crunch is on the rise, fiscal discipline on exploration is still too loose, lots of layers of management

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