Pros
I now have been at Riot for more than 5 years. I joined few months before the game launched, traveled and helped set up multiples offices and I now work in the Hong Kong office. There are already a lot of reviews about Riot Games and I made one something like three years ago. This time, I will then focus more on the Hong Kong office, its pros and cons.
---- International accountability structure ----
in most companies, a foreign office job is to basically execute in the local country whatever the head office has decided. Or what the regional office (Asia Pacific HQ, EMEA HQ, etc..) has decided.
At Riot, the structure is different. The headquarter basically decides and has authority on whatever needs to be the same everyone (like champion balance, company culture or the company logo), while the local offices decide and have authority on stuff that are specific to their territory (like local e-sports, local features, local community, etc…). What it means is that although you won’t have the authority to make a champion, a skin or change game balance from the Hong Kong office (we want the same for the whole world there, so HQ owns that), you’ll have the full accountability and authority on things that matters exclusively for China. This means: no dotted line reporting to another office, no back and forth approval over the ocean, no budget limit set by someone who doesn’t know your market, etc… If you are an entrepreneur and love action, building stuff and accountability, this is great. Your scope / impact might be more limited than in HQ (although China is a pretty big market), but you’ll have full ownership of whatever project you work on.
---- Culture----
Riot is super picky when it comes to maintaining its culture in the company. Several interviewers will interview only this area to vet during the interview process. What has been great is the company has not compromised on this when expanding into other countries. This was tricky as some of the Riot culture principles go against the local culture. As a example, the culture of performance and the principle of exiting poor performer which is unusual in some countries. Or the culture of direct and transparent feedback which is sometimes quite unusual in some asian culture. In the example of Hong Kong, Riot brought existing Rioters from different origins (America, China, Europe), but who were all Rioters for at least a couple of years. It helped ciment the culture in the office and have the new hires integrate in the culture right away. The office won’t compromise on culture fit for new hire, even if it means hiring slower than we’d want. As a result, the company culture is also transparent in the Hong Kong office.
----Office----
The office is really nice, and capture the same spirit, color scheme and comfort than HQ… with a great view as a plus! The other benefit is the location: it is based in Central, which means it is pretty accessible from anywhere in Hong Kong with massive public transportation network (buses, subway, ferry, escalators, etc…)
----Team size----
What has been great for a few of us is to work in a small team. Some of our other offices start to be big. Even if we keep an interesting team oriented org, these are still big offices where you often run into people you don’t know. At the moment, the Hong Kong office is just about 20 people. So everybody knows everybody and has good visibility on the rest of the office.
----Focus----
Because the office is focused exclusively on China, there is little distraction about all the other things that happened across the company. Several of us worked in other Riot offices for a few years and the ability to just focus on one topic is pretty cool (sure China is a big topic, but still one topic)
----Partner----
In China, League of Legends is operated by a partner. This brings pros and cons. Among the pros is this enables a lot of things. We can do stuff in China that are harder to do in other territories. Additionally, when we evaluate new projects, our partner can chip in and help with resources, and thus increase our ability to get things done.
Cons
----Partner----
On the other hand, working with a partner means you also have to negotiate sometimes. Although we get full accountability from our HQ, we still sometimes have to negotiate with our local partner. Most of the time we are in alignment, but obviously sometimes we are not. The good news is that we are still accountable of these negotiations in our Hong Kong office. So up to us to improve the relationship or better negotiate when we think it should be improved :-). Nothing is left to fate.
----Foreign management----
One of the problem of taking existing Rioters to set up the Hong Kong office is that quite a bit of the team doesn’t speak Chinese. This limits their opportunity to interact with players, our partner and the growing number of new Rioters. On the bright side, almost all the product owners speak Chinese and the goal of the office is to have full local and chinese speaking management in the next couple of years, just like any other foreign office.
