As league of Legends enters its twelfth season, and the rushes forward into 2022, Riot Games CEO Nicolo Laurent has published a blog post titled Calling the Shot: the Next Five Years at Riot Games. In said blog post, he sets out future plans for the company, while addressing the recent settlement the company made with current and former women working at the studio.
Early on in the post, Nicolo reveals five major goals staffers at Riot Games will be working towards in the next five years. These goals include:
- Win Our Genres: Maintaining their position as genre-leaders
- “Unleashing fandom” through gameplay and events
- Cultivating creativity and innovation within Riot
- Expanding development studios globally
- Reinventing the viewing experience for their esports events.
Further down the piece, Nicolo sets a few changes that are on the way, setting them out as “1) reworking how we work, 2) continuing to evolve our culture to focus on our goals, 3) acknowledging our past and beginning a new chapter, 4) rewarding Rioters so they share in Riot’s success, and 5) ensuring everyone at Riot feels good about where we’re going and is committed to helping get there.”
In the explanation of each of these points of improvement, the second and third seem to directly refer to past events at Riot and the reports of sexism (some of which Nicolo have been levied at Nicolo himself). Nicolo writes “As the world and society have grown more and more divisive, and companies everywhere have struggled to maintain their identity and foster healthy collaboration, we think it’s more important than ever to refocus Rioters on our mission and our company’s reason for being.”
“We’re asking Rioters to commit to a Riot where everyone feels supported. Where ideas get productive feedback, where Rioters ask tough questions in ways that foster healthy dialogue, where we’re all learning and growing from diverse perspectives, and where we’re unapologetically and relentlessly focused on players.”
Point three refers to the settlement directly and establishes an approach where previous issues at Riot are acknowledged and worked on as the company attempts to move ahead. “To be clear, we aren’t asking anyone to forget about this chapter and move on. On the contrary, the lessons we’ve learned together over the last few years will be a crucial part of the Riot Games origin story. Something we’ll continue to teach as part of our ‘denewb’ orientation and lessons that we’ll use to always orient ourselves toward what is right for Rioters to make Riot the best possible place to work.”
The post goes on to establish the goal of Riot becoming one of the best-paying studios in the games industry, and an expansion of their ‘queue dodge’ program, which previously allowed staff to leave within six months of joining with part of their salary on the way out. This expansion would see any member of staff able to make use of the queue dodge system for a limited time.
As it stands, this statement certainly sets a high bar for Riot for the coming years. Whether they can live up to the goals set in this piece, especially those involving the wellbeing of their staff, is something the industry will surely have a keen eye on for the foreseeable future.
For more context on the settlement that was referred to throughout this article, read our coverage on the Riot Games gender discrimination lawsuit here. In other Riot Games news, the director of development for Valorant has recently moved onto a mysterious new project at Riot.
