Riot Games

• 1. Introduction

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  The founders of Riot Games, Brandon "Ryze" Beck and Marc "Tryndamere" Merrill, first met as roommates at the University of Southern California. Both were studying business. In September 2006 they started a company in Southern California to make one game, League of Legends. Today Riot Games is based in Los Angeles. It develops and publishes games and also runs its own esports tournaments. How did two business students persuade investors to back an unusual idea? What happens when millions of people start watching a game as well as playing it? And why did a company built on listening to its players end up answering to its own employees, to lawyers and to state regulators?

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• 2. A Free Gamble

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  Defense of the Ancients showed Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill something most studios overlooked. A game could keep its players for years, and keep earning money, if the developer stayed with it. The two men thought too many developers hopped from one title to the next. They also admired designers in Asia who charged nothing up front and sold extra perks to players who wanted them.

  Santa Monica, California, became the company's first home, funded by family and angel investors. Its first recruit was Steve "Guinsoo" Feak, one of the early developers of DotA Allstars. That game is considered foundational to the multiplayer online battle arena genre, known as MOBA.

  Merrill later said that publishers were baffled by the game they were shown. It had no single-player mode, and it would be free to play. While the game took shape, the founders pitched investors a company rooted in e-commerce. Funding arrived over several rounds. Backers included the venture capital firms Benchmark and FirstMark Capital and the Chinese holding company Tencent.

  After six months of beta tests, Riot released League of Legends as a free-to-play game on the 27th of October 2009. Designers and executives joined online forums to adjust the game based on what players told them. Tencent, one of those early backers, would soon become the game's distributor in China.

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• 3. Tencent And Toxicity

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  On the 10th of May 2010, Riot announced that it would take over distribution and operation of League of Legends in Europe. To do that, it moved its European headquarters from Brighton to new offices in Dublin. In February 2011, Tencent invested for a 93 percent stake in the company. Tencent bought the remaining 7 percent on the 16th of December 2015, and the price was not disclosed.

  In 2012, Riot launched a "player behavior team" of psychologists to combat toxicity and harassment in the game. Its tactics included an opt-in chat between opposing players and an explanation to banned players of why they were banned. It also created a tribunal of players who weighed in on bans. Reported harassment dropped by 30 percent. Players and the gaming press have questioned how effective those results really were.

  By 2013, League of Legends was the most-played multiplayer PC game in the world. In 2015, Riot moved into a new building on a 20-acre campus in western Los Angeles. A year later, Inc. reported that the game had more than 100 million monthly players.

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• 4. Built For Spectators

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  During 2010 and 2011, while Riot was adding new features to League of Legends, the team noticed that people liked to watch the game being played. Riot's first world championship, held in 2011 at a conference in Sweden, was a small affair. Afterward the company decided to make its tournaments feel like professional sports. It bought broadcasting equipment, hired sports programming producers, and trained pro gamers to be "TV-ready".

  The University of Southern California's Galen Center hosted the 2012 championship, with prize money on offer. Later tournaments came to Berlin, Seoul, Madison Square Garden in New York City, and the Staples Center in Los Angeles. In 2017 the World Championship went to China, with the finals in Beijing. Today Riot runs 12 regional leagues with more than 100 teams. Each season has two splits, and teams earn championship points to reach the Mid-Season Invitational and the World Championship.

  In 2015, investors began buying stakes in teams and building their own squads. Owners have included the owners of the Washington Wizards, Cleveland Cavaliers, Houston Rockets, Golden State Warriors, Philadelphia 76ers and Los Angeles Dodgers. AOL co-founder Steve Case and life coach Tony Robbins also joined the list. Inc. cited that growth and star ownership when it named Riot its 2016 Company of the Year.

  The money brought friction. Players and coaches argued for a bigger share of esports revenue, and some people worried about Riot changing the game just before matches. In 2016 Riot answered with an open letter promising higher revenue shares and closer work with pro teams. In 2017 it franchised the ten-team North American league, which cost at least a substantial fee to enter. In November 2020 it announced the first Valorant Champions Tour.

  In 2021, Riot started building three remote broadcast centers, in Asia, in Seattle and in Dublin. The sites sit eight hours apart in time zones, so one crew can finish a full shift and pass control of a production to the next. The Dublin center opened in July 2022 in Swords, inside a former nightclub called The Wright Venue. It has six studios and keeps the club's disco ball, once promoted as the largest in Europe.

  Riot also signed a seven-year sponsorship with the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in August 2021. After FTX went bankrupt in November 2022, Riot began looking for legal ways to end the contract.

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• 5. Beyond One Game

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  In March 2016, Riot acquired Radiant Entertainment, a developer working on Rising Thunder and Stonehearth. Rising Thunder was effectively canceled after the deal, and its team moved to a new project. On the 13th of October 2017, Beck and Merrill announced they were returning their focus to making games. They handed day-to-day management of the League of Legends team to three longtime employees. Dylan Jadeja had been chief financial officer, Scott Gelb chief technology officer, and Nicolo Laurent president. Gelb became chief operating officer, Laurent became chief executive, and the founders became chairmen.

  In October 2019, Riot announced three games for 2020. League of Legends: Wild Rift was a version for mobile devices and consoles. A standalone mobile version of Teamfight Tactics came with it, along with the digital collectible card game Legends of Runeterra. Riot also teased Project A, a tactical shooter, Project L, a fighting game with League of Legends characters, and Project F, a multiplayer game set in Runeterra. Project A turned out to be Valorant. It entered closed beta on the 7th of April 2020 and was released on the 2nd of June 2020.

  Leanne Loombe headed Riot Forge, a publishing label announced in December 2019 to partner with smaller studios on League of Legends games. Two titles debuted at The Game Awards 2019. Ruined King: A League of Legends Story came from Airship Syndicate, and Convergence: A League of Legends Story came from Double Stallion Games. A tabletop arm, Riot Tabletop, followed in January 2020. Its first game was Tellstones: King's Gambit, a bluffing game for two or four players. Riot had already released the cooperative tabletop game Mechs vs. Minions in October 2016.

  Hypixel Studios joined Riot in April 2020, after Riot had spent eighteen months investing in it to help publish Hytale, a voxel-based sandbox game. That same month Riot announced plans for a Singapore office. In October 2021 it bought Kanga, a services firm that worked on fan hubs, merchandising and content aggregation.

  Arcane, an animated series made with the French studio Fortiche, reached Netflix worldwide in November 2021, and Tencent released it in China. It received a favorable critical reception. In March 2022, Riot announced an investment in Fortiche, and executives Brian Wright and Brendan Mulligan joined Fortiche's board. That same month Riot hired executives from Netflix, Paramount and HBO Max to lead film, television and music projects built on its universe.

  In October 2022, Riot bought Wargaming Sydney and renamed it Riot Sydney. The Cyprus-based Wargaming had owned the studio, which originally developed BigWorld, software used to build massively multiplayer online games. The price was not disclosed, and the deal excluded both the BigWorld technology and the studio's publishing arm.

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• 6. Cuts And Closures

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  In January 2023, Riot cut 46 employees in a round of layoffs. The same month, a cyberattack stole source code for League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics and an anti-cheat platform. The hackers offered the stolen data for sale on the dark web at US$700,000. Several Riot Forge games still reached players during 2023, including The Mageseeker by Digital Sun and Song of Nunu by Tequila Works. In September 2023, Dylan Jadeja became chief executive.

  Jadeja announced a far larger cut in January 2024. Riot would lay off 530 employees, about 11 percent of its workforce, and would shut down Riot Forge along with its planned Twitch competitor, Riot Esports Network. Jadeja explained the decision this way: "A decision like this has a massive impact on people's lives and on the culture of Riot. We're not doing this to appease shareholders or to hit some quarterly earnings number , we've made this decision because it's a necessity. It's what we need to do in order to maintain a long-term focus for players."

  In May 2024, a plaintiff sued Riot in California federal court over its partnership with the bankrupt exchange. The plaintiff's lawyers said they brought the claims because the plaintiff's losses from the exchange could not be recovered through the bankruptcy proceedings.

  In June 2025, Riot announced the closure of Hypixel Studios and the cancellation of Hytale. Years of development had included a major engine rewrite and a beta originally slated for 2021. Hypixel chief executive Aaron Donaghey confirmed that the game could not be finished in a way that honored its original vision. The studio began a phased wind-down.

  Two months later, in August 2025, Riot released Riftbound, a multiplayer trading card game set within the world of Runeterra.

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• 7. Culture On Trial

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  Over the first half of 2018, Kotaku spoke to about 28 current and former employees of Riot Games. Several said women at the company faced discrimination. Ideas from women were overlooked until men proposed them, and some women were groomed for senior jobs only to lose out to a new male hire. Employees described a "bro culture". Other accounts included explicit images sent by colleagues and bosses, a degrading email thread about a female colleague, and a list among senior staff discussing female colleagues in sexual terms. Kotaku speculated that this grew from Riot's long habit of serving "core" gamers in both products and hiring.

  Some employees told Kotaku the accusations were untrue or already being addressed. Oksana Kubushyna, head of the platform, said work on a more diverse and inclusive hiring process had started nine months before the article. Corporate communications lead Joe Hixson acknowledged the problems and said they did not match Riot's core values. He added that all employees must be held accountable, and he told Gamasutra that seniority would not affect discipline. In the week after the article, more current and former developers described their own experiences, including sexual harassment and misgendering. By the end of August 2018, Riot announced seven "first steps" for its culture and hired Frances X. Frei as a senior adviser.

  At PAX West in 2018, Riot offered a session for aspiring developers, with a panel and one-on-one résumé reviews. Only women and non-binary people could attend. Members of Riot's game communities were outraged, while Riot employees defended the session as a fix for a male-dominated industry. Some of the feedback turned into harassment and threats. Two employees tried to address it. One was fired and the other left, and Riot said both departures were separate from its diversity initiative.

  In December 2018, Chief Executive Nicolo Laurent emailed all employees. An internal investigation had led to the suspension of Chief Operating Officer Scott Gelb for two months without pay, over workplace misconduct. Gelb would also take training classes before returning. In January 2019, Riot updated the company values on its website for the first time since 2012. By February 2019, it had hired Angela Roseboro as chief diversity officer.

  About three months after the Kotaku story, one current and one former employee filed a lawsuit. They alleged gender discrimination in pay and position and a "sexually-hostile" workplace, and they sought class-action status. Three more employees filed their own suits in the following months. In April 2019, Riot tried to have two of the suits dismissed because those plaintiffs had agreed to arbitration when hired. Employees had been discussing a walkout since the first article. They were unhappy with the arbitration push, with the lack of transparency, and with Gelb's continued employment.

  On the 6th of May 2019, over one hundred Riot employees walked out. They demanded an end to forced arbitration for all past and current employees. Riot had promised to remove mandatory arbitration from new contracts and perhaps existing ones after the litigation ended. It had also set a 90-day plan on diversity and inclusion starting in May 2019. About two weeks after the walkout, Riot reversed course. It said it would not change arbitration in existing agreements while the litigation continued.

  A proposed class-action settlement in August 2019 would have paid damages to women employed at Riot over the previous five years. California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which had investigated gender discrimination at Riot since October 2018, filed a complaint. The department said the settlement was far too low. The state's Division of Labor Standards Enforcement also objected, because the deal would release Riot from labor liabilities. Riot denied the department's claim that it had colluded with the class's lawyer.

  The class withdrew the settlement and dropped its original lawyers in February 2020. It hired new counsel who had worked on earlier Me Too lawsuits. Riot said it still found the original figure "fair and adequate under the circumstances". In August 2021, the department asserted that Riot was interfering with its investigation by falsely telling employees they could not speak to the department directly. By the end of 2021, Riot had agreed to a new settlement. The court approved it in July 2022, with Riot to compensate 1,548 female employees between $2,500 and $40,000 each.

  In January 2021, Laurent's former assistant sued Riot and Laurent on sexual discrimination charges. The suit included claims of inappropriate language and labor mistreatment. Three members of Riot's board investigated and reported in March 2021: "We concluded that there was no evidence that Laurent harassed, discriminated, or retaliated against the plaintiff." They recommended no action against him. That same month, Alienware, a sponsor of Riot's League of Legends esports events, ended its partnership a year before the contract term, citing the ongoing litigation.

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• 8. Public Missteps

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  During the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, Riot Games discouraged political statements at its live events. It argued that overt statements on politics, religion and other sensitive topics could not be fairly represented in the forum its broadcasts provide. In 2019, players also found that League of Legends censored words sensitive in China, including Tiananmen and Uyghur. The censorship varied by server and language, and some restrictions were lifted after players complained on Reddit.

  In June 2020, Ron Johnson, Riot's global head of consumer products, shared a Facebook post that blamed George Floyd's killing by police on Floyd's criminal lifestyle. Riot placed Johnson on leave and opened an investigation. Johnson resigned from the company afterward.

  In July 2020, Riot announced that the planned Saudi Arabian city of Neom would sponsor the League of Legends European Championship series. Fans and Riot employees criticized the deal on social media and streaming channels. They cited Saudi Arabia's human rights record and violent attempts to evict the Howeitat tribe during construction of the city. Within days Riot canceled the partnership, apologized, and said the deal had been rushed.

  Riot also drew criticism for marketing the League of Legends character Seraphine through an in-character Twitter account. The account alluded to her struggles with low self-esteem, anxiety and impostor syndrome. Critics said it tried to trick players into feeling close to her in order to advertise. Creative director Patrick Morales said he was proud of the team, but that the campaign had "an unintended impact outside of the narrative we wanted to tell".

  After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian politician Mykhailo Fedorov asked Riot to withdraw from the Russian market. Riot declined. In March 2022, it donated proceeds from battle passes in several games, and profit from some in-game items, to humanitarian relief organizations working in Ukraine. Riot said the donations totaled $5.4 million.

  Riot has also gone to court over its games. In 2017 it sued Moonton Technology Co., developer of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, for copyright infringement, citing similarities to League of Legends. A California court first dismissed the case on forum non conveniens grounds. Tencent then filed a new suit in a Chinese court on Riot's behalf, and that court ruled in Tencent's favor in July 2018, awarding damages.

  In October 2019, Riot sued Riot Squad Esports LLC, an esports organization in Chicago founded in March 2019. The suit alleged that the group intentionally infringed on Riot's trademark of the word "Riot".

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