Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

riotgames.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 174 posts

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#161

Post by mlhpdx »

jachee wrote: post #77
mlhpdx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain? Unemployment is still very, very low and there are hundreds of thousand of open positions out there. Not sure about game companies, hence my asking.

I read an article about this recently, but can’t find it to officially cite it. However, the thrust was something like this: Despite unemployment being low, the reality is that many of those “thousands of positions” are either geographically-distributed duplicates of the same position, eternally-open cattle calls, or open-but-basically-a-formality for either getting a visa or an internal move. This makes the number o…

Fair, but it's also true that many of the positions eliminated were actually unfilled (paper shuffling). It's so hard to tell the facts from the spin.

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#162

Post by goalonetwo »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #159
goalonetwo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are the people making 65k as a household (median income per household in my state) managing this? I don't even understand how 2.5k$ grocery per month is possible. We are 3 in our households (young kid) and probably spending closer to 1k$ per month groceries and eating super healthy/organic.

Keep in mind we have 5 in our household to your 3. They probably eat cheaper food? We do a lot of fruits and veggies. But not organic. Eating out is too expensive, we don't do that. Also, I live in Southern California, it might be cheaper where you are.

yeah, being 5 is a big difference. We usually end up going to Costco once a week for ~250$/trip

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#163

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

zen928 wrote: post #160
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is not being able to buy a skin some kind of tragedy? It's a luxury item at any price. I'm sure there is a kid somewhere crying into his controller because he's been rejected by his online friends because he's using the default skin, but I think he's learning a valuable life lesson.

It's a potentially negative financial marker to the success of their business model of selling skins if their skins don't sell, I don't think there's any more sentiment to the statement beyond that

Given that the marginal cost of a skin is zero, and assuming they're not incompetent at evaluating the price elasticity of their sales, $200 is probably where they maximise profit.

The comment I was replying to didn't say they weren't selling, just that they were unaffordable to many people, so I don't really know what you're referring to.

Maybe it's a negative to alienate your customers in this way, or maybe it works financially to make skins just out of reach and 'aspirational' for most gamers.

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#165

Post by devjab »

asylteltine wrote: post #63
devjab wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economy isn’t doing so well and it’s not going to correct itself any time soon. It’s not really that noticeable on the larger scale but any company that produces anything non-digital is still having supply line issues. Not as bad as a few years ago, but still bad enough to cost the global economy a lot of potential growth. Then there is the higher interest rates, which in themselves are an issue for the economy.…

Is the economy bad? Seems fine to me. In general a “bad economy” seems entirely made up. It’s not like the money just disappears. I think it’s a concept invented to facilitate wealth transfers.

Well it depends on how you look at it. We’ve had to say no to several projects due to high interests rates and global supply lines, and we’re hardly the only company to be in that situation. So on one hand it’s not like we’re not still making money, we’re just making around 90% less than we could’ve done if the supply lines were still capable of delivering the stuff we need and if we were capable of doing projects where a good part were funded by loans on top of investor money.

The net result is that we’re around 2000 fewer people than we planned to be in 2025. Again, not that we aren’t generating money, because we’re still on black books, but far, far, less than what we wanted and it’s not likely to change in the foreseeable future.

One of the major reasons the job market is still doing just fine is because the larger generations are being replaced by much smaller generations, so there are simply fewer workers in the total pool. If there weren’t things wouldn’t look this bright.

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#166

Post by worthless-trash »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #71
goalonetwo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for the intrusive question but if you make software engineer level salary how is it that you don't have multiple months/years saved to mitigate for those possible layoffs? Or did we all fall for the lifestyle inflation trap that comes with high salaries? I'm probably a pessimist/realist but I have always lived way below my income and saved as much as possible because it really feels like the cash cow that softw…

I have 3 kids. My grocery bill alone is 2.5k/month.

Tell me you have teenage boys without telling me you have teenage boys ;)

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#167

Post by 0x500x79 »

SmallDeadGuy wrote: post #139
BlackjackCF wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it actually had to do more with esports pulling back quite a bit this last year. Riot was leaning into that pretty hard for League. That had to factor in for a large chunk of the headcount for layoffs. I just can’t imagine they’re cash flow negative given how popular League and Valorant are, but maybe they’re seeing enough of a dip in their numbers that they’re trending in that direction.

I thought LoL and Valorant e-sports was breaking records year on year? At least in Europe and Asia, I know the LCS is on the decline.

Breaking records does not mean profitable, having first hand knowledge of the situation esports (for Riot) is still very unprofitable -- the way that they try to measure esports profitability is by player increases/purchases after the events occur and leading up to the events and sponsorships of course.

esports does not bring in new players, it mostly brings back churned players or excites current players. The financial model for existing players versus new players is very different.

When you look at some of the sponsorship conversations over the past couple of years it makes sense why they needed to make some of the bets (https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/29/21347587/riot-games-saudi-...).

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#168

Post by nox101 »

e12e wrote: post #150
nox101 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look into unemployment benefits? I've never done this but I had acquaintances who looked forward to getting laid off because they'd get unemployment payments from the government for up to 6 months so they saw it as vacation. All they had to do was lie about looking for a job. This was quite a while ago so things might have changed. PS: not saying you shouldn't have gotten a better severance package.

> All they had to do was lie about looking for a job. So ... fraud? Probably nets you up to six months in prison?

I agree that it's wrong and was shocked when a friend brought up that's what they did and several friends chimed in "me too".

Unfortunately, tons of people in the world really don't care about wrong, they only care about what they can get away with? Their argument was "I paid the unemployment tax, I should be able to take advantage of the benefit". But I agree, the point is not to use as much as possible. It's to use as little as possible. We can't have nice things because lots of people will abuse the system.

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#169

Post by johnnyanmac »

goosejuice wrote: post #81
atlas_hugged wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name and shame please.

Curious, what would be a severance package HN would be satisfied with? I suspect the average US employee would be stunned to hear an offer of 6 months. So much negativity around these statistical outliers. The majority of companies in the US don't offer severance and it's very rare in some industries. Not saying that it's fair, but name and shame? Maybe we're living in different worlds.

Given the gauntlet that is modern tech interviews, 3 months. 1 month severance isn't an issue in a market where you can grab a new gig in 2-3 weeks. But all these places want 5 rounds of interviews.

Re: Changes at Riot Games and the road ahead

#170

Post by johnnyanmac »

hipadev23 wrote: post #27
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #20

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.

6 months for an artist with Riot on their resume? I can't imagine that not at least opening doors for them.
Post reply on HN