Sorry to hear about layoffs at Riot Games. I’ve known a few folks who’ve worked there over the years, and it’s always been a bit of a mystifying place, to me. Super frustrating to hear that the cuts are super deep, and that the folks in charge are basically taking no personal responsibility, but I guess that’s one of those things that I’ve always found mystifying about Riot. Some parts of it produce incredible things (I loved Arcane), and some things seem toxic AF. The consistent bit is that the leadership never actually takes what I’d consider “actual responsibility”.
But hey, game industry, am I right? Kotick made that his whole career and won a glorious and lasting victory for himself at the expense of everyone else, so others taking that playbook and running with it shouldn’t be surprising. Disappointing, sure, but hey, what the fuck do I know?
(Here comes the turn!)
What I *do* know is that if you’ve been impacted by this, and you’re looking for another job, you might need help with your resume. You’ve worked on huge, impactful products that helped define the industry, and everyone undersells their experience and impact. I wrote this doc, and it will be helpful if it’s been a while since you’ve polished up your resume.
While this seems like it’s a turn into cynical self-promotion, here’s the other turn – https://lnkd.in/gddfND3x It’s totally free. If you read through this and want personal help, reach out – send me a draft resume & provided you’ve ALREADY read the entire doc, I’ll help you for $0. (If you haven’t read the doc, it’s $1k/hr.)
So yeah – sorry that the never ending onslaught of layoffs keeps never ending. Maybe it’s about time we take a deeper look at how collective organization might give workers some actual leverage in this industry that relies *entirely* on the creative hard work and value that the workers provide.
Boy! This is a post that isn’t likely to go over well. đ I’m just disappointed that the rich keep getting richer by fucking the folks doing the work and saying that they’re somehow taking “responsibility” because gosh, laying people off sure “feels bad” like that’s equivalent to stripping 500+ people of their livelihood.
So yeah. If you need help with your resume, I’m here for you. If you need help talking through deciding to start up your own company to do things differently and BETTER, hit me up, I can help with that, too.
The ONLY good thing about the last two years is that this is the environment of desperation and chaos that creates the next big thing, and I hope whoever figures it out takes the opportunity to create something better than this garbage structure we have now.
I wanna put my previous post in a bit of context. When I started in the game industry, I worked 60-80 hour weeks, slept in the office, got paid for shit. I was called into the office on weekends when Iâd busted my ass all week getting my stuff done, just so that managers could have âbutts in seatsâ to show off to the execs who were wandering around the office on a Saturday for some reason.
This was all bullshit.
It was a stupid, awful way to run a team & a business, and when I had the opportunity to run things, I swore I would do things differently. At Self Aware, we made a *billion-dollar game* and crunched ABSOLUTELY NEVER. And thatâs not an accident. Thatâs a series of choices. We had to have some artists stay late *one night*. Itâs literally the only blemish on that record while I ran the studio. It was a couple of hours, they knocked it out of the park, and the Art Manager and I talked about it afterwards, relieved and proud of the team, but I made it clear that this was a failure on our parts, and we needed to do better in the future.
These kinds of layoffs are the consequence of choices. Theyâre a failure on the part of leadership. And yet, leadership *keeps getting off scot-free*. Worse, Wall Street *incentivizes* this mercenary bloodletting and *rewards* it with money for the people holding the axe. Leaders make a choice. Theyâre making record profits, they choose to cut to keep the stock price up, they cut to keep their exorbitant compensation. They say, âOh, I feel so bad,â but they *chose* to do these things.
Wall Street wonât hold them responsible. And workers, for the most part, canât, either. If theyâre hiring, in an environment like this, theyâll find people willing to fill those roles.
So the cycle continues.
But people are going to come out of this and create new teams with an animating purpose. What was âcrunchâ for me will be âlayoffsâ for them. Theyâll do whatever is necessary to run their teams in a way that values the team, and puts their needs *ahead* of the share price, and *ahead* of their personal comp. And those changes will create better studio cultures, and people will be excited and happy to be invested in that company, and the results will be *better*. Just like our results were better. We crushed the competition – Zynga – at a time when they had gobs of money and hundreds of people crunching nonstop to try to hang on to their lead.
They failed. We won.
In the future, look for the teams that are built to make positive change. Someoneâs going to get it right and eat the dinosaursâ lunch.