Riot Games Discusses Plans For The Future, Including Employee Ownership

With 2021 over and the dust from the recent lawsuit more or less settled, Riot Games is looking to the future. The company’s CEO, Nicolo Laurent dropped a rather detailed post on the Riot site yesterday, detailing their plans for esports, future projects (not all necessarily games), the community, and – most importantly – their staff. If you’re interested in all the other stuff, then you’ll definitely want to read the post. What we’re going to talk about here is the last bit.

In sections 3 and 4 of the post, Laurent discusses the fallout from the class action suit and other legal troubles over the past year. As he noted, the company “was at the heart of what became a reckoning” in the industry. He also added they’ve come a long way and are continuing to work to make things better. Interestingly, he also notes that Riot is not asking people to just forget the whole thing happened. Instead, they intend to include it in the company history and use it in their orientation and as a reminder of the direction they need to move in. It’s a pretty mature response compared to others we’ve seen in the past year or so.

The next big thing is that Riot, along with Tencent, has decided that as part of their long-term strategy for employee compensation, they will be giving partial ownership of the company to the Riot employees. This means that Riot staff now have the chance to own a portion of the company, and “directly participate in the risks and rewards of ownership”.

For those who may not love it at Riot as much as they thought they would, the company is also expanding on its program that allows staff to “opt-out”, no questions asked, within the first six months of their time there. Before, those who chose to use the program were paid a portion of their salary to aid with transitioning to their next gig. Now, the plan is to offer those people 25% of their base salary and 3 months of COBRA (healthcare) benefits. They’ll also receive their full bonuses, even if they leave before bonuses are paid.