Live data from Hacker News

Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

riotgames.com

31–40 of 174 posts

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#32
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly what sales is like, and it has been like that, for as long as I can remember. However, good salespeople can make a lot of money.

So can mediocre lucky ones. A lot of systems are very poorly designed.

Famous sales pep talk: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wVQPY4LlbJ4

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#33

Minimum six months severance pay + healthcare + cash bonus. That is incredibly generous all things considered.

I still remember the eye-roll my manager gave me when I asked if there was severance when laid off in 2009.

I feel bad for all these layoffs, but it seems the support system has improved drastically since then.

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#34
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true with all layoffs. If you can't explain your direct role in creating your product/service, you're going to be higher on the chopping block. Sales, marketing, HR, admins, PMs, etc. are usually the first to go because they don't "keep the lights on" and it's hard to measure their impact. While it's true that it's also hard to measure a single engineer's impact, it's scarier to fire someone who may be expens…

Sales does not belong on that list, since their impact is the easiest of all to measure ($$$). Also, top-down layoffs tend to target expensive staff with large paychecks, without accounting for institutional knowledge or intangible value delivered.

Is it though? Without products there are no sales at all. A compelling enough product will sell with no marketing/sales effort, so sales is really only whatever that baseline is + (extra units sold from sales and marketing efforts - cost of sales of marketing). I would think this is actually quite hard to measure, you also have to normalize against many external market factors and behavior of competitors.

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> non-frantically 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.

[deleted]

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#37

Minimum six months severance pay + healthcare + cash bonus. That is incredibly generous all things considered.

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.

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#38
post #23

Not a fan of any of their games, but I'm so glad this didn't affect Arcane.

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.

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#40

> This isn’t to appease shareholders or to hit a quarterly earnings number—it’s a necessity. I smell BS

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.
Post reply on HN