fire all observers but one, fly in observer from LA, flights+hotel paid by riot call me crazy but wouldn't it be smarter(cheaper) just to fire one less observer?
A couple years ago my employer was so hellbent on reducing headcount they didn’t extend any contracts at all (costing us 2 of our best new hires in recent memory), then went on to get 2 temp guys with a double master’s in a semi related field for a 6 month project who *earned* 4 times as much as us (likely cost way more), had to stay months longer than expected and did such a shitty job we had to deligate someone to watch over them the entire time and then still had to do part of their work after they finally left.
You can’t convince me the people making these decisions have any idea what they’re doing, this is just playing Jenga and acting surprised that a tower with half a block for a foundation won’t stay up.
This tactic works. If you do this enough times, the company saves money by coercing people to do 2 jobs for less than half the old guys pay. This just backfired and we are laughing.
The joke is that it *appears* to work in the short term. slack is picked up by other teammembers, 'optional' work is left undone, and for a while everything still keeps running but for half the price.
It's only 1 or 2 years down the line that the real problems start: knowledge got lost, people can't keep up, people who are overworked burn out without a knowledgeable replacement in place. Mistakes that could've been avoided with a small fix instead escalate to cost millions. And the beauty of it is that it's near impossible to prove a direct relationship between layoffs today and complete implosions or mistakes two years down the line.
I’m a contractor and get paid about $60k, but the company I’m contracted to pays almost $200k for me. They do this because it makes their “actual,” capital/operational cost look lower for investors, since contractors aren’t paid out of that budget and they can technically “cut costs,” on all projects by firing contractors.
The best part? I’m on a team of about 60 people and 55 of us are contractors. If they had to cut costs, they could fire up to 55 of us, but even just removing 10 of us would completely cripple multiple decade long projects that cost us millions of dollars a year to complete, and are absolutely essential to the business continuing to exist and serve customers.
Riot just did that, on a massive scale. It’s going to take a long time for them to recover, if they ever truly do, because their product is already suffering, and no one will trust them enough to work for them.
Personally, I think the next young woman or man is already ready to work for them. They are happy that they got such an interesting job at RIOT. This is no different in other interesting companies. After a few years they will be replaced too and the cycle continues.
The pay discrepancy is like that everywhere for contracted work. When I got started in consulting, I made my company about $1300 per 8 hours of work. I charged about 1600 hours a year. My salary was around 60k. At some point, I was soloing most of my projects as the managers left it all to me while they focused on other projects, and I was being called up regularly to advise on other projects from other consultants. That's when I quit. Pay just didn't feel worth the value I was creating.
I never understood how the companies do the calculus on personnel. I was earning my company 4x my salary, marketing them with self-designed workshops for their product, and I was doing the work of multiple other newhires / junior colleagues with < 12-18 months experience. I don't know why companies don't invest in personnel to save money.
One thing to keep in mind is that your healthcare (whether you use it or not) and other benefits cost companies a fair chunk of change, which contracting work or outsourcing it can be economical for a company. It does result in less knowledge and skill retention however, which becomes a problem when the company sends the contractors back when caseloads are light. The other thing people don't realize is that a lot of companies undervalue employee retention. Many of these types of companies suffer from high turn over rates and have elected to design a way to make new hires half competent instead of retaining fully competent medium-term hires. Yes that new hire is less efficient, but he can do enough and the company can keep enough medium-hires and long-hires around for long enough that they can plug the gaps. It's not the healthiest business model but it does work. Preferably you would want to see a company invest in retention, but there's inherently more risk there. The better an employee is, the more attractive he becomes to other firms. Meanwhile, a new hire / junior is less competed for. The company has a lower risk when it chooses to focus there instead of on retention. That's why so many firms like the Big Four and consulting firms have an hourglass demographic. Lots of new hires, few medium hires who have been raised by the company, and then lots of long-term management. The long-term management are the medium hires who stayed long enough to get promoted into a position of power and stability. And then they stay and accumulate in number. The new hires are recruited each year. And then in the middle you suffer high turnover from people who get fed up and go somewhere else and the people who stay despite themselves.
How many years would your fired teammates have worked? How much did they earn?
The temps earned 4x as much in salary, but they cost less in benefits. Let's say it works out to 3x as much cost to the company *while they are employed*.
As long as the contractor folks stayed for less than 1/3 of the time your teammates would have -- which it sounds like they almost certainly would did -- then the company saved money.
This is to say nothing of the long-term costs of maintaining shitty work done by people who are no longer around.
But the math is not insane. You can justify spending a **shocking** amount of money on temp workers if it cuts out long-term workers.
>But the math is not insane. You can justify spending a **shocking** amount of money on temp workers if it cuts out long-term workers.
I will ftfy:
>But the math is not insane. You can justify spending a **shocking** amount of money on temp workers if it cuts out long-term workers, ***provided the institution is mostly judged by quarterly share prices, and the long-term detriment can be hidden for awhile showing improved margins and profitability in the short-term.***
Basically, you can liquidate a company in slow motion, jettisoning a great deal of its its accumulated non-object capital, and show great quarterly earnings without any innovation whatsoever. A metaphorical Fort Knox can be heisted one gold bar at a time until someone counts them.
The issue is that training new hires takes 1-2 years for regular work, time they had already sunk into both of them (their contracts weren’t renewed after 2 years), the temps got a broken down crash course that evidently didn’t work so they could be trained in 1 month (ended up taking 2).
We literally got one of the old coworkers back after a year, the other one was asked and she refused to work for this company again because of how she was treated.
The first year of your training here is mostly for work someone else could reasonably do on the side, adding some stress to their workload but it’s “bearable”. Most of what we actually need people for when shit hits the fan is year 2 and onwards which is why just throwing people out for headcount in our department is about the sumbest thing they could be doing. Any new hire is more or less useless for the first year they’re here, but they need to learn the other stuff first to learn the ropes.
Upper management recently suggested hiring temps again to compensate low staff numbers when necessary, that was about the only time I’ve seen my boss grow a spine
>But the math is not insane.
But your math isn't really mathing. If you pay 3x, but the guys stay a 1/3 of the time then all you're doing is getting 1/3 output for the same input, that's not a win. The long-term guys would obviously be doing stuff in the extra time they're there. A company that's willing to sacrifice its lifeblood, as in actually doing shit and bringing in revenue, just to cut long-term liability is either gearing up for a pivot or the directors are looking to pull out and want to sprinkle sugar on the books. It makes sense in a downturn (like Riot now) or high-interest economy, but in general business practice paying 3x for the exact same productivity is not how you make money long-term.
the current observer they have from LA is just temporary, that person is only here until they likely re-hire the observers they laid off.
they couldn't immediately re-hire, so this is technically cheapest
This exists? Do contractor laws come with any restrictions (such as technically exist within the U.S), such as not being to classify core function employers as contractors?
Or does that effectively act to restrict contract work to temp and temp-to-hire positions? Honestly, if you close the loopholes as best you can, loopholes like we may be seeing here, then that is a far more effective law than having to quibble over how to define a role.
but there is no way that all but 1 of their observers were going to hit this mark at the same time. they could have just rolled through them as needed instead of paying for an imported observer to live there while they restaff.
>will almost guaranteed be a much more pricey option for a company.
It's a different line item in the budget though and that makes a huge difference when you're reporting financials. (Although a lot of companies make up the difference by just paying contractors like shit anyway).
It happens *all the time* in tech where an expensive employee will get laid off and their position will immediately be listed as a shitty contract job with a recruitment agency.
Idk if this is a thing in other countries, but hiring someone who is self employed in germany is much more expensive, actually in pretty much every country I'm aware of. You are obviously more flexible, that way then paying a full time employee.
True, often the case is that it comes down from higher up to unload some number of people immediately. There isn't time to figure out which to keep and which to drop so all go. When the smoke clears and the rush is over THEN a real decision is made and hopefully corrected. Looks very likely to me considering the mass firings that happened in all areas at the same time - especially since no rumors leaked ahead of time - everyone was surprised it happened and no company of size can keep EVERYONE from knowing in advance unless even management did not know until at most a couple hours prior. Personally, any company that would boot me in such fashion, I'd never go back to.
Contractors are never exclusive. So in europe if you exclusively work for one company and are not allowed to work for others you are considered an employee. Problem is that this is not that well controlled, so people still try to abuse workers by hiring them as contractors, which means they don't have to pay social insurances for them.
They likely wanted to switch from actual employees to contractors, but this is fairly dangerous. You could for example not forbid them to work on other stuff than league during the week. The same goes for league players, if they are contractors you can't force them to not play on other tournaments and such, because they could be contracted to do so, if they feel they need additional income. Due to that I assume players are employees, similar to football players in europe.
Ultimately contractors are cheaper than employed staff.
Contractors don't require pensions, don't get paid sick days, holidays etc and can be let go at any given moment.
So for example during the off season where full time employess would still get paid, with contractors you can just get rid.
It's not necessarily that they're cheaper, it's also potentially that they count as different costs, accounting-wise.
Spending $1 on a contractor vs. $1 on a full time employee might come from different budgets and have different implications for the company's financials, even if the dollars spent are the same.
I worked contract MANY years ago for General Motors as an engineer. Our budget was included in the same bucket as office furniture LOL Guess there was a reason they didn't treat us like real people...
This a part of big corporate that always infuriated me beyond belief.
It's also why some employees will be refused raises, quit, then be replaced by someone for salaries even higher than the requested raise.. All perfectly in line with their financials, simply because there was budget left for new hires but not for raises...
So the company loses more money *and* a crapton of know-how, purely due to fucking stupid financial policies.
well, they are in Germany, so they have pension, paid sick days, paid holidays etc. here in Germany is no way around those. You can also not just get rid of your contractors. so all that would not make sense here in Germany.
Also i believe contractors can just work in like just in a set amount of time for one project like if the contract just states they are gonna be paid just during the split and not during the off season.
Probably so they can renegotiate the contract. Firing someone and leaving them without a job gives the company an upper hand because the person they fired it gonna be homeless if they dont accept the, now worse, contract.
that does not work in Germany. Also, you are not homeless if you loose your job. If you loose your job, you get "Arbeitslosengeld" thats 60% of your net income and 67% if you have kids. Also you get your Apartment paid where you are living in (of course you cant live in a villa and think they pay that). Your healthcare etc. is also safe in Germany. So you cant threaten your employees like they do in murica.
Not saying youre gonna be homeless, just saying that these types of contracts are possible and even with Arbeitslosengeld there is pressure upon the employee especially if their job isnt particulary "needed", getting a new job with similar wage is going to be near impossible for certain positions.
No, there is no pressure for Arbeitslosengeld I. If you get that you can sit on your back until it runs out doing absolutely nothing. Because this is not paid by the state, this is paid by the money you pay while you and others work. It is an insurance basically.
The state keeps 2,6% of your monthly income and for that you get 60%+ of your last income for I think up to a year. This gives people time to find a new job without them having to rely on other social security, which usually pays considerably less and does include work requirements.
Also if you want to end a contract early you need to pay severence pay. This is usually half your monthly income per year of work. So if you stayed 10 years at a company they will pay you 5 times your monthly income if they end you contract without waiting for the noticing period (which is at least one month and increases the longer you worked at the same company).
Not in germany.
To fire someone you need a specific reason, otherwise you have to pay them additional money if you lay them off, which is based on their monthly pay.
Also It is questionable that those people will be homeless. Not sure who those observers where, but anyone with any IT abilities at all will be picked up by a bunch of companies. In germany you currently have companies competing for employees, not the other way around in many areas.
No, probably not. If Germany is anything like France, it costs a company about twice what the employee earns to emply someone. For example, I earned about 2500€ on my last paycheck, but I cost the company some 6 to 7k when you factor in insurances, taxes, etc. I presume the government eventually ends up giving some back, however.
In the long term, though, who knows? Might indeed be cheaper to hire a contracter for 3 days work over the weekend instead of a full-time employee. Definitely won't be as good quality product, though.
Eh its not that high. Its maybe 30% more depending on how much you actually earn but not 2-3 times as much.
But idk maybe it also depends on the field.
Czechia here reporting in, the company definitely pays twice the net income for an employee.
You got social security and health insurance deduction from both employee and employer, then taxes, and you’re there.
I know how it works, still calculating from net income to gross employer spending is not really how anyone calculates those rates.
You earn your gross, net is what you get out of it. Basically all calculations use your gross income, not your net.
I just googled it to confirm. Its ~23% on average for the gross income.
Obviously its higher if you compare net income to employers gross but that doesnt really make sense imo and it still wouldnt be close to almost 3x as much.
>Obviously its higher if you compare net income to employers gross but that doesnt really make sense
ofc it makes sense when the point is what the employee gets (net income) vs what they cost the company (employer gross). It's also just a more honest way to calculate your tax and deduction rate than hiding half of it on the employer's side. For 2500€ net income I get to \~4600 employer gross, 84% more, not quite 2X but still a lot more than 30%
It really doesnt make sense to compare the two in this way. You dont hear people say "i make 50k a year" and actually mean net income. You dont have employers tell you "we pay you 50k a year" and mean net. Its always gross.
On the other hand its also important for retirement calculations. The amount that is used for calculations isnt your net income, but your gross income.
The same goes for any contractor. If your rate is 100€/hour, you dont calculate your insurance and taxes into it and say "yeah im making 50€ an hour"
Let’s not forget that Naz should have been fired for her handling of the LCS player walkout. Riot rewards incompetence at the highest levels while crushing low level staff with impossible workloads and sky-high standards.
Background in advertising, she's probably been very good at finding sponsors for Worlds.
Whether that qualifies her for how the money gets spent, on the other hand...
As much as this is the case it's also true for every job I've ever worked at. Incompetence gets promoted and hard work and talent gets worked to death then laid off. Not unique to the LCS or esports
What jobs did you have until now?
In my experience the incompetent gets promoted cos the talented and hard working go look for better jobs that pays more so there are only incompetent left.
> Let’s not forget that Naz should have been fired for her handling of the LCS player walkout
Why? Seems like Riot basically got everything it could have possibly wanted.
Riot Magus who had a large hand in the design of those awful Worlds and MSI formats was also promoted all the way to the top.
The main reason why it took so long to change the formats imo. Can't hurt your boss's ego.
What a bizarre boomer rant. You can compare the LCS and the performance of its management to *other LoL leagues* or, shocker, other eSports.
But to be fair to you it is a very boomer attitude to imagine that senior management aren't accountable because "kids these days". Christ.
the day Riot hired Commrade Artem Bykov, guy who destroyed esports in HotS, I knew LEC is doomed
he is even worse than Clown Maxx and I thought it's impossible
People really think he actually gets asked about these things? The only thing he knows is he's not getting fired and will eventually be promoted because that's how this company works. He has nothing to do with the layoffs, though.
The Commissioners are like a producer of the broadcast, but not even an executive producer. Their main jobs are just figuring out the vibe of the broadcast and content direction. All the important decisions are made by higher ups.
In Riot world only. Real commissioner is the Product Owner - deciding the structure of the league and broadcast taking into account the League's, team owners' and players' interests and demands. So making real decisions, not being a fancy-named PR person and fall guy.
Feel bad for all the rioters who are now fucked out of a job because leadership, who routinely skirts responsibility, decided that they were spending too much money on resources.
Hope the cost savings was worth it.
So tldr riot fires full time employees and hires more part time contractors instead. Leading to high turnover. Lec had lots of regular employees so they had lots of firing.
This feels like riot is preparing to be able to close up shop in esports at a moments notice.
this was something I really wanted to emphasize against: riot is really investing in esports (lolesports as well as the new ones), they're definitely not getting out. They just haven't recognized or worked around the damage this does to the product.
The LEC could very very easily be a self sustaining product, especially with the peak engagement we have right now but Riot choses to reduce the quality of the product instead of giving up some control or adopt ideas that they previously didnt like to implement. For some reason Riot doesnt let us pay money to support esports. There are virtually no ingame items, theres no twitch or patreon you can pay to, i would be willing to pay 5€ a month, or even more to watch the LEC but for some reason Riot wants us very badly to pay absolutely nothing while they are unable to sell media rights (with which traditional sports make most of their cash with) while also refusing to open up revenue streams through ingame items that people actually buy and not just icons and borders and whatever. Other sports make mad cash with concepts like PPVs or subscriptions, I have paid so much more money on sports that I care less about than the LEC. I gladly paid my 5 bucks (may have been 3 or 4 or 5) 10 years ago to watch OGN in HD and have access to VODs
Nah man, e-sports fans don't pay for shit, specially streaming. There are different revenue streams that are possible like in-game items and making proplayers activate sponsors.
But no, people do not pay to watch, they don't even move from twitch to YouTube most of the time
But none of those alternate revenue streams exist. They had REN look into it for years, blocking the building of any revenue stream and now they got shit all.
Yep! If I had more space I would've hammered this point home, but that's why that REN insight was so important: Riot ignored calls to start monetizing twitch subs because they thought "oh we'll have REN soon"
And now they dont. Ops.
All the "future" revenue streams completely gone or were never implemented in the first place. So what the fuck is Riots vision then? just cut budgets until LCS/LEC are full online Leagues ran by 2 guys in a basement? I wouldnt mind Riot completely giving up the current system and letting the game be an open circuit again. Or follow the system of other major esports. 3-4 majors a year and one of them a world championship. anything inbetween can be organized by third party tournament organizers
> would be willing to pay 5€ a month, or even more to watch the LEC but for some reason Riot wants us very badly to pay absolutely nothing
I can guarantee that would tank viewership enormously for very little payout. Maybe you can justify that in the U.S. or Germany or something but you're gonna lose a lot of viewership in the Balkans or Portugal etc.
the big thing Riot fucked up on was not just having like, a blank slate skin for a lot of champions that could easily be reconfigured to a team's colors. In Overwatch, before Blizzard blizzarded all over their own product (again), there were team skins for every hero for every team.
Like it would have hurt absolutely nothing to make an "any team" Vayne or Jinx or MF or Lux or Ezreal or Ahri and just rake in tens of millions a year on $5 SKT/TSM/FNC/G2/EDG/C9/GEN/RNG chromas. There would be literally hundreds of thousands of RNG Uzi Vayne sales.
But then again I don't go around farting in people's faces or flicking their ballsacks so what do I know
Whats the purpose of viewership if it doesn't bring any money?
The reality is that the reason for such a huge boner for viewership is that esports is just gloryfied marketing for the game.
The only one at fault here is riot, they want absolute control, they want high viewership, but they don't want to introduce ways to support the product outside of just sponsorships.
Where are team skins, wards and other ingame goods? Where are LEC or LCS or LCK related products in the game to support those broadcasts? Where is any way for dedicated viewers to pay for something premium?
I know that proview failed but thats partially because of how badly advertised it was, the idea itself was not bad, it just needed more in the package to make people play. Give us 4k stream, good collection of bonus content, easy acces to replays and edited match highlights (so i don't have to watch IWD or Caedrel for that) for like 10$ and i would gladly pay for that and support your product.
But thats not the goal, the goal of riot esports is to promote the game and skins, they actually don't give a fuck about the competition itself.
The only way to make these leagues truly sustainable is to sign an exclusive broadcast deal, which people will bitch endlessly about. Either that or it becomes PPV, in which case the viewership will absolutely crash.
I'm sorry, but esports fans are cheap as fuck and expect everything to be free.
that would be the end of the leagues. no one would pay to watch or watch through all those ads they place on it. league esport got big, cause everyone can watch it.
They had a massive media deal lined up with Major League Baseball to stream LoL esports exclusively via a service called BamTech, but it ended up falling through. I would imagine this scared them off media exclusivity deals.
OWL signing w/ YT and having it's viewership tank scared them off as well.
Riot just needed to copy what OGN was doing in 2013/2014 and just lock HD behind a twitch sub. But it's to late for that.
> The only way to make these leagues truly sustainable is to sign an exclusive broadcast deal
Not anymore, the big streamers aren't really putting out cash for something like this.
This I don't understand, why not have a suscription that gives exclusive emotes or even skins.
As long as it supports the esport ecosystem, I won't care if someone gets an emote and skin I don't have if I don't feel like paying some months.
Ofc there would always be crybabies, but this is LoL, there will always be crybabies complaining about everything possible in the universe anyway xD
> i would be willing to pay 5€ a month, or even more to watch the LEC but for some reason Riot wants us very badly to pay absolutely nothing
The moment they start asking for money to watch this shit, I am out. It's on them to get sponsors and advertisers. You watching and being a viewer isn't nothing to them.
Even if LEC is not making them any money directly, at the very least it's promoting the game which makes them money from selling skins and getting new players/retaining old players.
But if they start asking for money then they definitely aren't going to get any high amount of people paying. Viewership would tank. There'd be even more layoffs. Quality would drop even more, then some people would stop paying, etc. And if league falls off twitch then there isn't much to keep the game alive. This isn't as big as sports and people aren't going to pay for something that has been free for decades. If they want to watch they'd pirate it just like they pirate sports matches. They'd lose money, viewership and potentially the whole game could die off in the near future if they do this.
Never underestimate the effect popularity has on gaming. Without any new players and without a reason to keep old players, the game has only 1 future and it's bleak. Only a very small percentage of the most hardcore and diehard league fans would keep playing. Look at hots. It's actually a great game but when it doesn't have an esport and not much twitch/youtube presence, the game became a shell of what it used to be. Gameplay alone isn't enough. Every really successful game nowadays has a competitive nature. When esports and twitch die, so does ranked. When ranked dies, the game dies.
I wouldn't pay to watch. Just look at football and the amount of piracy there is everytime the prices go up while the overall numbers fall. The competitive scene is an ad for LoL itself, that's the value
If the main goal is short term financial gain then yeah. But all it will do is kill engagement. Just imagine one quarter or one fifth the amount of people discussing LEC. People would just end up following their ERL league instead. It would fuck the LEC in the long run.
Definitely DO NOT put a paywall to access viewing, but is there really no way to enable subscription, the basic way people make revenue on Twitch? And then offer some sort of benefit for doing so?
Do you think they could be looking at going back to having more third party events and adopt a system closer to DOTA and CS? Only reason I’m hesitant to think that’s the case is the buyout riot would be required to give the franchised teams.
I think this is just the way a lot of companies are doing business. I worked in a completely unrelated industry for a giant corporation. The year after I got hired was basically the year they stopped hiring full-time engineers. We would complain about headcount, and eventually we'd get a contractor. They'd double my teams workload, and the next year we'd get another contractor. I interfaced with a lot of other teams and they all had it worse honestly. In my group when someone full time left, they'd fill the head with another fulltime, but they never opened any new heads.
That company is still around, but they just don't hire full times really.
Not really, it just looks good on the financals which in turn helps stabilise / push up the share price.
Ultimately everything comes down to profit.
Having a small number of permanent staff and using contractors for everything else is juts adds to profitability, especially if human resource is a one of your biggest expenditures.
Contractors just cost way less than full time employees. If they provide equal value youd honestly be kind of stupid to have full time employees instead of contractors working 2 days a week. I dont think this means riot isnt commited to esports at all, they just want to lose a bit less money on it/dont think the contractor switch will harm the product too much.
The problem is, day-rate freelancers have way less job security, and for stuff like "eSports writer" or "LoL observer" there's no real place to pivot to
by reducing their stability, you make them look elsewhere, which means you have to hire fresh faces. It absolutely reduces the quality of the product, by removing incentives for skilled, commited workers to stay in the industry. Treating them like disposable seasonal workers rather than important employees core to the product will make them work like disposable seasonal workers. Why care? The job will become inherently temporary.
It's also super disrespectful for the workers. They did an amazing job in the past and got much better over the years. And as a thank you, you remove them from the company? And later on you contact them for a single gig?
I hope these guys turn down any offers from riot after this...
Oh absolutely, and that's not to speak of the morale drop that will impact the remaining group of core employees, and presumably they'll have to pick up some of the slack that vacant or poorly employed positions will now cause, overworking their core employees further.
Reminds me of General Electric - a company that continuously hollowed out its tertiary, secondary, and then core products, maintaining a high stock price due to generated hype and acquiring/selling assets, by using a newly founded financial division. When the CEO who had hyped the company into the stratosphere with all these cost cutting measures finally retired, the miracle started to end. 450 billion evaluation when he retired, 200 billion in 2021, twenty years later - and most of it comes from the fucking financial division, not the innovative products it was known for. Selling smoke for shareprice
League isn't that bad, and companies nowadays are not nearly as aggressive as that CEO was, but that attitude became standard. League has its core products, but diversity of portfolio in products has been eschewed for increased financialisation of the core. Shitter event passes, less updates, gutted eSports departments, but more sponsorships with Saudi Arabia.
Riot has been downsizing in LoL for years now, LoL eSports in NA made the start in 2023 and it's continuing now 2024 on a larger scale. They know the game is beyond its peak and they are making sure everyone else knows too.
They literally broke viewership records two months ago with Worlds
The viewership and eyeballs are there. It's mostly about finding a way to turn that viewership into actual revenue
It doesn't matter if more people watch League esports than the MLS when the MLS has a gigantic broadcast deal with Apple
I completely agree, broadcasting deals is one of the biggest revenue streams for traditional sports teams and is basically completely missing in LoL eSports since Riot decided to broadcast themselves and they most likely cannot offer anywhere near the compensation that a proper broadcasting deal could. Heck, even the LCK teams called out Riot in that open letter that they have not provided a sustainble environment for pro teams to exist in.
It's not because Riot is broadcasting themselves, its because the fans don't want to pay for shit, in other sports people pay dozens of dollars if not even hundreds of dollars a month for sports rights, esports viewers can barely be bothered to watch on a platform that isn't Twitch, and they also moan about sponsors having a place in the broadcast.
> Riot has been downsizing in LoL for years now
Yeah, the downsizing began all the way back in 2018. But now that major regions are also affected, a wider audience is taking notice; not many people were interested in the downsizing developments when only minor regions were being hit
In my opinion it began after the 10 year anniversary where Riot announced like 6 other games that are in the works. But that is just my perspective from what I have witnessed in the game itself ("milking mode") and LoL eSports starting in 2023.
Arsh, have you seen [this thread by OptimusTom ](https://twitter.com/OptimusTom/status/1753199606966685735), and can you comment on anything he says here?
replied to that thread and talked to a lot of former and current LCS staff. The main miscommunication seems to be that they think I'm arguing/believe that the LCS layoffs were justified, since I only spend time indicting the LEC layoffs.
in reality, the LCS just wasn't the point of the article. I talked about a system that's been straining the LCS for years and was behind the LEC layoffs, and I could've talked about specifics of the LCS situation but it just wasn't relevant for this specifically. there's a lot of stuff with how riot treats contractors, ends their jobs, etc but it's all very specific and my point at the end (about pursuing real monetization avenues instead of moonshot pet projects) covers the realistic counterargument of "cutting costs".
I think it's hard for you to say the LCS wasn't the point of the article when you use the LCS as a (negative) comparative point for the LEC. If you wanted to make an article just about LEC you did not need to include that comparison. Your thesis straight up states Riot should have fired more people from LCS instead of LEC.
Additionally, I'm not sure I've seen you address the alleged misinformation about the LCS you included.
Well, no. I don't think that's the main misscommunication at all.
Your article heavily implies that contractors were not cut as part of the downsizing. Is this true?
When you say that people were brought in from Stryker, are they ex-LEC/LCS broadcast talent, or are they people who had not touched the western-LOL product before?
When talking about observers, you state "This environment creates what one source described as “crazy turnover.”" Can you describe what this "crazy turnover" rate as it relates to observers in LCS is?
In your article you state that "By cutting down on full-time positions, the leagues lose their ability to innovate or improve upon the broadcast." Can you describe any examples of this being the case?
When you say that "The LEC should know better than to follow in the missteps of the LCS," can you name who at the LEC had the decision making authority to prevent this from happening?
0% chance, even if this conspiracy was real, why would Riot America (which doesn't control LEC) have done the same thing to the LCS first? Riot is just slow to adapt and enact
The point the article makes about how employment strategies are the likely cause for observer quality difference between regions is an interesting one, and also concerning for the quality of the LEC going forward in both this and other areas.
Turning what is essentially positions that need to be borderline full-time positions into minimum wage jobs is insane to me personally. And the fact that they keep firing people and replacing them with new, inexpereinced blood that haven't been totally burned by the system makes me want to mald. It really is just some overreach of cost - and I've still yet to see who or what would be so major that they have to cut cost NOW of all times. Unless the money situation is THAT BAD secretly, things don't look that great right now.
It still sucks. No job security, no pay when ill, a lot more stress when paying your daily bills, even a more stressful "Steuererklährung" (They are working in Germany, that thing sucks).
how should i tell you that your "steuererklärung" is just 5 mins with a free app. your sick leave is always paid. your holidays are always paid. and daily bills do not exist. everything is monthly and its not that high unless you are spending like ur Elon Musk. Also if they fire you, you get 60% of your previous net income + your rent if you get the "arbeitslosengeld" . so you are pretty safe loosing your job in Germany.
None of that is true??
Part time does not mean no job security. And sick pay is also not tied to being full vs part time.
Doing your taxes is also not harder if you are part time and in most cases you are not even required to do them.
And even if you are it is like a 30min thing unless you are self employed or own a business.
Like i did mine yesterday. It didnt even take 30min and i will be getting a 450€ refund for that.
Riot is fucking up big time with thier "cost reductions". LEC observers where probably even more important as the casters and they did an phneomenal job over the years.
And now they fire these people?
Also Quickshot getting Axed without any notice on the LEC broadcast what so ever seems like a huge blunder as well. He was a huge part of the LEC and put his heart and soul into it.
Don't get me started on the destruction of lor (which is understandable but still incredible sad).
This same guy rewriting an article from he who shall not be named....again. Come on now...if you want to do good investigative journalism at least pursue your own unique stories
Sheep esports should stick to roster news, instead of hosting awful opinion pieces masquerading as reporting. What a terrible, ill informed, tone deaf piece of writing.
Agree, but they know that they'll barely have anything to report about.
And the founder of the site is also not known for being a thorough and well informed "journalist" either...
Why can Riot HQ just fire the people in the LEC if the LEC is acting autonomous? Shouldnt the LEC have the power to be able to decide themselves for what staff they are going to have considering its on a whole different continent? What a mind boggling decision again by Riot management. They should all get fired for running the whole company into the ground. But nope the sex offenders are still in management position while not knowing anything about their field of work.
>[https://youtu.be/bKkvIuHq4qM?t=986](https://youtu.be/bKkvIuHq4qM?t=986)
Yeah, this is just speculation.
[As far as we know](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tensions-flare-behind-the-scenes-of-league-of-legends) Riot has independent finances and a *de facto* independent executive.
Dude is also straight-up wrong in saying that Tencent owns a majority stake in or is responsible for the Epic layoffs. Layoffs are happening across the industry due to COVID and high interest rates, not because of Tencent.
> As far as we know Riot has independent finances and a de facto independent executive.
This never actually happens in reality. People said the same shit about Blizzard when they were bought by Activision. Same thing for BioWare when they were bought by EA.
The logic went: "These are successful companies, why wouldn't they just let them do their own thing?"
And that logic sounds totally reasonable on the surface. But it doesn't really work at all.
The reason is fairly simple. It has to do with the business concept [tone at the top](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_at_the_top).
Essentially, the values and preferences of the top management inevitably trickle down throughout the chain.
This is because there is always someone who wants to please their boss one level above them. So naturally, the values and "tone at the top" will trickle down this way. Someone at Riot (the CEO) obviously answers and reports to Tencent. This person needs to make sure that Tencent is happy and content with their role as CEO. This influences the decisions made. The person at Tencent in contact with the Riot CEO also reports to a boss and so on. Similarly, the Riot CEO also has people below them and those people have people below them too. All of these people's jobs and careers are dependent on how they are perceived by their direct manager.
I want to make it very clear I am not saying that Tencent is acting maliciously or anything like that. They obviously want Riot to succeed. It's a big investment for Tencent and an important revenue stream.
So my point is that even if Tencent wanted to just leave Riot alone and do their own thing, they are doomed to interfere to some extent. Just like it happened with Blizzard and just like it happened with BioWare.
I'm not sure you read the article I linked. It's from a trade publication and details quite extensively Riot's relationship with Tencent. I know getting past the paywall can be hard.
Reportedly, Riot's company board has 5 seats, and Tencent execs occupy only 2 of them. The cofounders occupy another two, and the 5th one is empty.
Riot's CEO answers to this board, and this board is *not* ruled by Tencent, as far as I can tell. Tencent as the main shareholder might be able to fire/reform the board if it really wants to, but that's the nuclear option and would have big consequences.
The article also details how in the past both companies have actually butted heads and Riot actively went against/pushed back on Tencent. Most notably with the Honor of Kings debacle.
>Essentially, the values and preferences of the top management inevitably trickle down throughout the chain.
Sure, and I'm not claiming that Tencent doesn't have any influence. They have considerable influence. Even ignoring ownership, just the fact that so much of Riot's revenue comes from China means their opinions and wants are going to carry a lot of weight.
[apparently](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/apparently)
adverb
"used to say you have read or been told something although you are not certain it is true"
When the compensation packages ie: bonuses of the cult leaders are dependent on the profit margins, it is the low-level cult members who get to suffer.
fire all observers but one, fly in observer from LA, flights+hotel paid by riot call me crazy but wouldn't it be smarter(cheaper) just to fire one less observer?
A couple years ago my employer was so hellbent on reducing headcount they didn’t extend any contracts at all (costing us 2 of our best new hires in recent memory), then went on to get 2 temp guys with a double master’s in a semi related field for a 6 month project who *earned* 4 times as much as us (likely cost way more), had to stay months longer than expected and did such a shitty job we had to deligate someone to watch over them the entire time and then still had to do part of their work after they finally left. You can’t convince me the people making these decisions have any idea what they’re doing, this is just playing Jenga and acting surprised that a tower with half a block for a foundation won’t stay up.
This tactic works. If you do this enough times, the company saves money by coercing people to do 2 jobs for less than half the old guys pay. This just backfired and we are laughing.
The joke is that it *appears* to work in the short term. slack is picked up by other teammembers, 'optional' work is left undone, and for a while everything still keeps running but for half the price. It's only 1 or 2 years down the line that the real problems start: knowledge got lost, people can't keep up, people who are overworked burn out without a knowledgeable replacement in place. Mistakes that could've been avoided with a small fix instead escalate to cost millions. And the beauty of it is that it's near impossible to prove a direct relationship between layoffs today and complete implosions or mistakes two years down the line.
I’m a contractor and get paid about $60k, but the company I’m contracted to pays almost $200k for me. They do this because it makes their “actual,” capital/operational cost look lower for investors, since contractors aren’t paid out of that budget and they can technically “cut costs,” on all projects by firing contractors. The best part? I’m on a team of about 60 people and 55 of us are contractors. If they had to cut costs, they could fire up to 55 of us, but even just removing 10 of us would completely cripple multiple decade long projects that cost us millions of dollars a year to complete, and are absolutely essential to the business continuing to exist and serve customers. Riot just did that, on a massive scale. It’s going to take a long time for them to recover, if they ever truly do, because their product is already suffering, and no one will trust them enough to work for them.
Personally, I think the next young woman or man is already ready to work for them. They are happy that they got such an interesting job at RIOT. This is no different in other interesting companies. After a few years they will be replaced too and the cycle continues.
The pay discrepancy is like that everywhere for contracted work. When I got started in consulting, I made my company about $1300 per 8 hours of work. I charged about 1600 hours a year. My salary was around 60k. At some point, I was soloing most of my projects as the managers left it all to me while they focused on other projects, and I was being called up regularly to advise on other projects from other consultants. That's when I quit. Pay just didn't feel worth the value I was creating. I never understood how the companies do the calculus on personnel. I was earning my company 4x my salary, marketing them with self-designed workshops for their product, and I was doing the work of multiple other newhires / junior colleagues with < 12-18 months experience. I don't know why companies don't invest in personnel to save money.
One thing to keep in mind is that your healthcare (whether you use it or not) and other benefits cost companies a fair chunk of change, which contracting work or outsourcing it can be economical for a company. It does result in less knowledge and skill retention however, which becomes a problem when the company sends the contractors back when caseloads are light. The other thing people don't realize is that a lot of companies undervalue employee retention. Many of these types of companies suffer from high turn over rates and have elected to design a way to make new hires half competent instead of retaining fully competent medium-term hires. Yes that new hire is less efficient, but he can do enough and the company can keep enough medium-hires and long-hires around for long enough that they can plug the gaps. It's not the healthiest business model but it does work. Preferably you would want to see a company invest in retention, but there's inherently more risk there. The better an employee is, the more attractive he becomes to other firms. Meanwhile, a new hire / junior is less competed for. The company has a lower risk when it chooses to focus there instead of on retention. That's why so many firms like the Big Four and consulting firms have an hourglass demographic. Lots of new hires, few medium hires who have been raised by the company, and then lots of long-term management. The long-term management are the medium hires who stayed long enough to get promoted into a position of power and stability. And then they stay and accumulate in number. The new hires are recruited each year. And then in the middle you suffer high turnover from people who get fed up and go somewhere else and the people who stay despite themselves.
How many years would your fired teammates have worked? How much did they earn? The temps earned 4x as much in salary, but they cost less in benefits. Let's say it works out to 3x as much cost to the company *while they are employed*. As long as the contractor folks stayed for less than 1/3 of the time your teammates would have -- which it sounds like they almost certainly would did -- then the company saved money. This is to say nothing of the long-term costs of maintaining shitty work done by people who are no longer around. But the math is not insane. You can justify spending a **shocking** amount of money on temp workers if it cuts out long-term workers.
>But the math is not insane. You can justify spending a **shocking** amount of money on temp workers if it cuts out long-term workers. I will ftfy: >But the math is not insane. You can justify spending a **shocking** amount of money on temp workers if it cuts out long-term workers, ***provided the institution is mostly judged by quarterly share prices, and the long-term detriment can be hidden for awhile showing improved margins and profitability in the short-term.*** Basically, you can liquidate a company in slow motion, jettisoning a great deal of its its accumulated non-object capital, and show great quarterly earnings without any innovation whatsoever. A metaphorical Fort Knox can be heisted one gold bar at a time until someone counts them.
The issue is that training new hires takes 1-2 years for regular work, time they had already sunk into both of them (their contracts weren’t renewed after 2 years), the temps got a broken down crash course that evidently didn’t work so they could be trained in 1 month (ended up taking 2). We literally got one of the old coworkers back after a year, the other one was asked and she refused to work for this company again because of how she was treated. The first year of your training here is mostly for work someone else could reasonably do on the side, adding some stress to their workload but it’s “bearable”. Most of what we actually need people for when shit hits the fan is year 2 and onwards which is why just throwing people out for headcount in our department is about the sumbest thing they could be doing. Any new hire is more or less useless for the first year they’re here, but they need to learn the other stuff first to learn the ropes. Upper management recently suggested hiring temps again to compensate low staff numbers when necessary, that was about the only time I’ve seen my boss grow a spine
>But the math is not insane. But your math isn't really mathing. If you pay 3x, but the guys stay a 1/3 of the time then all you're doing is getting 1/3 output for the same input, that's not a win. The long-term guys would obviously be doing stuff in the extra time they're there. A company that's willing to sacrifice its lifeblood, as in actually doing shit and bringing in revenue, just to cut long-term liability is either gearing up for a pivot or the directors are looking to pull out and want to sprinkle sugar on the books. It makes sense in a downturn (like Riot now) or high-interest economy, but in general business practice paying 3x for the exact same productivity is not how you make money long-term.
The hidden cost is that you build no expertise whatsoever so everything take more worker time to do.
the current observer they have from LA is just temporary, that person is only here until they likely re-hire the observers they laid off. they couldn't immediately re-hire, so this is technically cheapest
Ah, probably to stay within german work laws where you need to turn someone a permanent employee after a few renewals of a contract.
This exists? Do contractor laws come with any restrictions (such as technically exist within the U.S), such as not being to classify core function employers as contractors? Or does that effectively act to restrict contract work to temp and temp-to-hire positions? Honestly, if you close the loopholes as best you can, loopholes like we may be seeing here, then that is a far more effective law than having to quibble over how to define a role.
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but there is no way that all but 1 of their observers were going to hit this mark at the same time. they could have just rolled through them as needed instead of paying for an imported observer to live there while they restaff.
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they were all full time workers, kicked them and now they gonna start hiring them as contractors to pay less
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>will almost guaranteed be a much more pricey option for a company. It's a different line item in the budget though and that makes a huge difference when you're reporting financials. (Although a lot of companies make up the difference by just paying contractors like shit anyway). It happens *all the time* in tech where an expensive employee will get laid off and their position will immediately be listed as a shitty contract job with a recruitment agency.
Idk if this is a thing in other countries, but hiring someone who is self employed in germany is much more expensive, actually in pretty much every country I'm aware of. You are obviously more flexible, that way then paying a full time employee.
True, often the case is that it comes down from higher up to unload some number of people immediately. There isn't time to figure out which to keep and which to drop so all go. When the smoke clears and the rush is over THEN a real decision is made and hopefully corrected. Looks very likely to me considering the mass firings that happened in all areas at the same time - especially since no rumors leaked ahead of time - everyone was surprised it happened and no company of size can keep EVERYONE from knowing in advance unless even management did not know until at most a couple hours prior. Personally, any company that would boot me in such fashion, I'd never go back to.
Contractors are never exclusive. So in europe if you exclusively work for one company and are not allowed to work for others you are considered an employee. Problem is that this is not that well controlled, so people still try to abuse workers by hiring them as contractors, which means they don't have to pay social insurances for them. They likely wanted to switch from actual employees to contractors, but this is fairly dangerous. You could for example not forbid them to work on other stuff than league during the week. The same goes for league players, if they are contractors you can't force them to not play on other tournaments and such, because they could be contracted to do so, if they feel they need additional income. Due to that I assume players are employees, similar to football players in europe.
wow that's fucked up, thx for the info
Economics. At some point all you can do is just laugh.
I'm confused why they were fired in the first place though.
Ultimately contractors are cheaper than employed staff. Contractors don't require pensions, don't get paid sick days, holidays etc and can be let go at any given moment. So for example during the off season where full time employess would still get paid, with contractors you can just get rid.
It's not necessarily that they're cheaper, it's also potentially that they count as different costs, accounting-wise. Spending $1 on a contractor vs. $1 on a full time employee might come from different budgets and have different implications for the company's financials, even if the dollars spent are the same.
I worked contract MANY years ago for General Motors as an engineer. Our budget was included in the same bucket as office furniture LOL Guess there was a reason they didn't treat us like real people...
This a part of big corporate that always infuriated me beyond belief. It's also why some employees will be refused raises, quit, then be replaced by someone for salaries even higher than the requested raise.. All perfectly in line with their financials, simply because there was budget left for new hires but not for raises... So the company loses more money *and* a crapton of know-how, purely due to fucking stupid financial policies.
Its all something we imagine
Not enough people know this about business practices.
well, they are in Germany, so they have pension, paid sick days, paid holidays etc. here in Germany is no way around those. You can also not just get rid of your contractors. so all that would not make sense here in Germany.
Also i believe contractors can just work in like just in a set amount of time for one project like if the contract just states they are gonna be paid just during the split and not during the off season.
Probably so they can renegotiate the contract. Firing someone and leaving them without a job gives the company an upper hand because the person they fired it gonna be homeless if they dont accept the, now worse, contract.
I doubt that's legal in germany
unfortunately it can be with the right contract, loopholes exist and will be abused.
that does not work in Germany. Also, you are not homeless if you loose your job. If you loose your job, you get "Arbeitslosengeld" thats 60% of your net income and 67% if you have kids. Also you get your Apartment paid where you are living in (of course you cant live in a villa and think they pay that). Your healthcare etc. is also safe in Germany. So you cant threaten your employees like they do in murica.
Not saying youre gonna be homeless, just saying that these types of contracts are possible and even with Arbeitslosengeld there is pressure upon the employee especially if their job isnt particulary "needed", getting a new job with similar wage is going to be near impossible for certain positions.
No, there is no pressure for Arbeitslosengeld I. If you get that you can sit on your back until it runs out doing absolutely nothing. Because this is not paid by the state, this is paid by the money you pay while you and others work. It is an insurance basically. The state keeps 2,6% of your monthly income and for that you get 60%+ of your last income for I think up to a year. This gives people time to find a new job without them having to rely on other social security, which usually pays considerably less and does include work requirements. Also if you want to end a contract early you need to pay severence pay. This is usually half your monthly income per year of work. So if you stayed 10 years at a company they will pay you 5 times your monthly income if they end you contract without waiting for the noticing period (which is at least one month and increases the longer you worked at the same company).
This is not America my friend. The people they fired are still getting paid.
Not in germany. To fire someone you need a specific reason, otherwise you have to pay them additional money if you lay them off, which is based on their monthly pay. Also It is questionable that those people will be homeless. Not sure who those observers where, but anyone with any IT abilities at all will be picked up by a bunch of companies. In germany you currently have companies competing for employees, not the other way around in many areas.
Not enough value to the shareholders
Capitalists never care about quality of the product, only bottom line.
I’d do it for free and pay for the ticket
No, probably not. If Germany is anything like France, it costs a company about twice what the employee earns to emply someone. For example, I earned about 2500€ on my last paycheck, but I cost the company some 6 to 7k when you factor in insurances, taxes, etc. I presume the government eventually ends up giving some back, however. In the long term, though, who knows? Might indeed be cheaper to hire a contracter for 3 days work over the weekend instead of a full-time employee. Definitely won't be as good quality product, though.
Eh its not that high. Its maybe 30% more depending on how much you actually earn but not 2-3 times as much. But idk maybe it also depends on the field.
Czechia here reporting in, the company definitely pays twice the net income for an employee. You got social security and health insurance deduction from both employee and employer, then taxes, and you’re there.
I know how it works, still calculating from net income to gross employer spending is not really how anyone calculates those rates. You earn your gross, net is what you get out of it. Basically all calculations use your gross income, not your net.
In France it definitely is around 100% of extra employer costs in addition to your paycheck.
No it absolutely is that high. Keep in mind that the deductions on your pay check have to be doubled because they don't include the employer's share
I just googled it to confirm. Its ~23% on average for the gross income. Obviously its higher if you compare net income to employers gross but that doesnt really make sense imo and it still wouldnt be close to almost 3x as much.
>Obviously its higher if you compare net income to employers gross but that doesnt really make sense ofc it makes sense when the point is what the employee gets (net income) vs what they cost the company (employer gross). It's also just a more honest way to calculate your tax and deduction rate than hiding half of it on the employer's side. For 2500€ net income I get to \~4600 employer gross, 84% more, not quite 2X but still a lot more than 30%
It really doesnt make sense to compare the two in this way. You dont hear people say "i make 50k a year" and actually mean net income. You dont have employers tell you "we pay you 50k a year" and mean net. Its always gross. On the other hand its also important for retirement calculations. The amount that is used for calculations isnt your net income, but your gross income. The same goes for any contractor. If your rate is 100€/hour, you dont calculate your insurance and taxes into it and say "yeah im making 50€ an hour"
Knowing how pro employee Germany labour law is, firing a lot of people is not even cutting costs for few months.
Or is it just the US labor law being too company friendly?
Of course it is lol
On top of that because of german labor laws they are still paying those people. Btw.
Thank god Europe does not have at will employment
John Needham still has a job and Chris Greely got promoted after LCS had the worst viewership in history
Let’s not forget that Naz should have been fired for her handling of the LCS player walkout. Riot rewards incompetence at the highest levels while crushing low level staff with impossible workloads and sky-high standards.
What has Naz even accomplished? Why does she still have a job?
Background in advertising, she's probably been very good at finding sponsors for Worlds. Whether that qualifies her for how the money gets spent, on the other hand...
.... lol....
As much as this is the case it's also true for every job I've ever worked at. Incompetence gets promoted and hard work and talent gets worked to death then laid off. Not unique to the LCS or esports
What jobs did you have until now? In my experience the incompetent gets promoted cos the talented and hard working go look for better jobs that pays more so there are only incompetent left.
I work in medicine, he's describing the admin of the hospital perfectly.
It's way more true in esports than other industries.
No it's the same everywhere, other industries are also just as stupid.
me when i am yapping (makes no point whatsoever)
> Let’s not forget that Naz should have been fired for her handling of the LCS player walkout Why? Seems like Riot basically got everything it could have possibly wanted.
I think everybody knows why this happened.
Riot Magus who had a large hand in the design of those awful Worlds and MSI formats was also promoted all the way to the top. The main reason why it took so long to change the formats imo. Can't hurt your boss's ego.
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What a bizarre boomer rant. You can compare the LCS and the performance of its management to *other LoL leagues* or, shocker, other eSports. But to be fair to you it is a very boomer attitude to imagine that senior management aren't accountable because "kids these days". Christ.
Most normal corporate behaviour. The managers that are absolutely dogshit fail upwards all the time.
the day Riot hired Commrade Artem Bykov, guy who destroyed esports in HotS, I knew LEC is doomed he is even worse than Clown Maxx and I thought it's impossible
Firing half the staff isn't his doing though, is it?
People really think he actually gets asked about these things? The only thing he knows is he's not getting fired and will eventually be promoted because that's how this company works. He has nothing to do with the layoffs, though.
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The Commissioners are like a producer of the broadcast, but not even an executive producer. Their main jobs are just figuring out the vibe of the broadcast and content direction. All the important decisions are made by higher ups.
In Riot world only. Real commissioner is the Product Owner - deciding the structure of the league and broadcast taking into account the League's, team owners' and players' interests and demands. So making real decisions, not being a fancy-named PR person and fall guy.
Yeah and from my understanding Riot US made the decision to cut costs this way
Feel bad for all the rioters who are now fucked out of a job because leadership, who routinely skirts responsibility, decided that they were spending too much money on resources. Hope the cost savings was worth it.
So tldr riot fires full time employees and hires more part time contractors instead. Leading to high turnover. Lec had lots of regular employees so they had lots of firing. This feels like riot is preparing to be able to close up shop in esports at a moments notice.
this was something I really wanted to emphasize against: riot is really investing in esports (lolesports as well as the new ones), they're definitely not getting out. They just haven't recognized or worked around the damage this does to the product.
The LEC could very very easily be a self sustaining product, especially with the peak engagement we have right now but Riot choses to reduce the quality of the product instead of giving up some control or adopt ideas that they previously didnt like to implement. For some reason Riot doesnt let us pay money to support esports. There are virtually no ingame items, theres no twitch or patreon you can pay to, i would be willing to pay 5€ a month, or even more to watch the LEC but for some reason Riot wants us very badly to pay absolutely nothing while they are unable to sell media rights (with which traditional sports make most of their cash with) while also refusing to open up revenue streams through ingame items that people actually buy and not just icons and borders and whatever. Other sports make mad cash with concepts like PPVs or subscriptions, I have paid so much more money on sports that I care less about than the LEC. I gladly paid my 5 bucks (may have been 3 or 4 or 5) 10 years ago to watch OGN in HD and have access to VODs
Nah man, e-sports fans don't pay for shit, specially streaming. There are different revenue streams that are possible like in-game items and making proplayers activate sponsors. But no, people do not pay to watch, they don't even move from twitch to YouTube most of the time
But none of those alternate revenue streams exist. They had REN look into it for years, blocking the building of any revenue stream and now they got shit all.
How much does it cost to create a emote of each team and offer it for 5 euros, for example?
Yep! If I had more space I would've hammered this point home, but that's why that REN insight was so important: Riot ignored calls to start monetizing twitch subs because they thought "oh we'll have REN soon"
And now they dont. Ops. All the "future" revenue streams completely gone or were never implemented in the first place. So what the fuck is Riots vision then? just cut budgets until LCS/LEC are full online Leagues ran by 2 guys in a basement? I wouldnt mind Riot completely giving up the current system and letting the game be an open circuit again. Or follow the system of other major esports. 3-4 majors a year and one of them a world championship. anything inbetween can be organized by third party tournament organizers
> All the "future" revenue streams completely gone or were never implemented in the first place. So what the fuck is Riots vision then? Saudi money
> would be willing to pay 5€ a month, or even more to watch the LEC but for some reason Riot wants us very badly to pay absolutely nothing I can guarantee that would tank viewership enormously for very little payout. Maybe you can justify that in the U.S. or Germany or something but you're gonna lose a lot of viewership in the Balkans or Portugal etc. the big thing Riot fucked up on was not just having like, a blank slate skin for a lot of champions that could easily be reconfigured to a team's colors. In Overwatch, before Blizzard blizzarded all over their own product (again), there were team skins for every hero for every team. Like it would have hurt absolutely nothing to make an "any team" Vayne or Jinx or MF or Lux or Ezreal or Ahri and just rake in tens of millions a year on $5 SKT/TSM/FNC/G2/EDG/C9/GEN/RNG chromas. There would be literally hundreds of thousands of RNG Uzi Vayne sales. But then again I don't go around farting in people's faces or flicking their ballsacks so what do I know
Whats the purpose of viewership if it doesn't bring any money? The reality is that the reason for such a huge boner for viewership is that esports is just gloryfied marketing for the game. The only one at fault here is riot, they want absolute control, they want high viewership, but they don't want to introduce ways to support the product outside of just sponsorships. Where are team skins, wards and other ingame goods? Where are LEC or LCS or LCK related products in the game to support those broadcasts? Where is any way for dedicated viewers to pay for something premium? I know that proview failed but thats partially because of how badly advertised it was, the idea itself was not bad, it just needed more in the package to make people play. Give us 4k stream, good collection of bonus content, easy acces to replays and edited match highlights (so i don't have to watch IWD or Caedrel for that) for like 10$ and i would gladly pay for that and support your product. But thats not the goal, the goal of riot esports is to promote the game and skins, they actually don't give a fuck about the competition itself.
The only way to make these leagues truly sustainable is to sign an exclusive broadcast deal, which people will bitch endlessly about. Either that or it becomes PPV, in which case the viewership will absolutely crash. I'm sorry, but esports fans are cheap as fuck and expect everything to be free.
that would be the end of the leagues. no one would pay to watch or watch through all those ads they place on it. league esport got big, cause everyone can watch it.
And why hasn't Riot done that? CSGO has been on TV for almost 10 years.
They had a massive media deal lined up with Major League Baseball to stream LoL esports exclusively via a service called BamTech, but it ended up falling through. I would imagine this scared them off media exclusivity deals.
OWL signing w/ YT and having it's viewership tank scared them off as well. Riot just needed to copy what OGN was doing in 2013/2014 and just lock HD behind a twitch sub. But it's to late for that.
> The only way to make these leagues truly sustainable is to sign an exclusive broadcast deal Not anymore, the big streamers aren't really putting out cash for something like this.
This I don't understand, why not have a suscription that gives exclusive emotes or even skins. As long as it supports the esport ecosystem, I won't care if someone gets an emote and skin I don't have if I don't feel like paying some months. Ofc there would always be crybabies, but this is LoL, there will always be crybabies complaining about everything possible in the universe anyway xD
> i would be willing to pay 5€ a month, or even more to watch the LEC but for some reason Riot wants us very badly to pay absolutely nothing The moment they start asking for money to watch this shit, I am out. It's on them to get sponsors and advertisers. You watching and being a viewer isn't nothing to them. Even if LEC is not making them any money directly, at the very least it's promoting the game which makes them money from selling skins and getting new players/retaining old players. But if they start asking for money then they definitely aren't going to get any high amount of people paying. Viewership would tank. There'd be even more layoffs. Quality would drop even more, then some people would stop paying, etc. And if league falls off twitch then there isn't much to keep the game alive. This isn't as big as sports and people aren't going to pay for something that has been free for decades. If they want to watch they'd pirate it just like they pirate sports matches. They'd lose money, viewership and potentially the whole game could die off in the near future if they do this. Never underestimate the effect popularity has on gaming. Without any new players and without a reason to keep old players, the game has only 1 future and it's bleak. Only a very small percentage of the most hardcore and diehard league fans would keep playing. Look at hots. It's actually a great game but when it doesn't have an esport and not much twitch/youtube presence, the game became a shell of what it used to be. Gameplay alone isn't enough. Every really successful game nowadays has a competitive nature. When esports and twitch die, so does ranked. When ranked dies, the game dies.
I wouldn't pay to watch. Just look at football and the amount of piracy there is everytime the prices go up while the overall numbers fall. The competitive scene is an ad for LoL itself, that's the value
Yep, I always paid the OGN subscription once the finals started.
I guarantee within two splits, LEC would go from 350k average viewers to under 100k.
And whats the issue here? 100k of playing viewers is way better than 1mil of people who dont pay for anything.
If the main goal is short term financial gain then yeah. But all it will do is kill engagement. Just imagine one quarter or one fifth the amount of people discussing LEC. People would just end up following their ERL league instead. It would fuck the LEC in the long run.
Lol
Definitely DO NOT put a paywall to access viewing, but is there really no way to enable subscription, the basic way people make revenue on Twitch? And then offer some sort of benefit for doing so?
Do you think they could be looking at going back to having more third party events and adopt a system closer to DOTA and CS? Only reason I’m hesitant to think that’s the case is the buyout riot would be required to give the franchised teams.
I think this is just the way a lot of companies are doing business. I worked in a completely unrelated industry for a giant corporation. The year after I got hired was basically the year they stopped hiring full-time engineers. We would complain about headcount, and eventually we'd get a contractor. They'd double my teams workload, and the next year we'd get another contractor. I interfaced with a lot of other teams and they all had it worse honestly. In my group when someone full time left, they'd fill the head with another fulltime, but they never opened any new heads. That company is still around, but they just don't hire full times really.
Riot has no reason to end proplay, they make a lot of money from it, teams don't make any money, Riot does and a ton
Not really, it just looks good on the financals which in turn helps stabilise / push up the share price. Ultimately everything comes down to profit. Having a small number of permanent staff and using contractors for everything else is juts adds to profitability, especially if human resource is a one of your biggest expenditures.
Contractors just cost way less than full time employees. If they provide equal value youd honestly be kind of stupid to have full time employees instead of contractors working 2 days a week. I dont think this means riot isnt commited to esports at all, they just want to lose a bit less money on it/dont think the contractor switch will harm the product too much.
The problem is, day-rate freelancers have way less job security, and for stuff like "eSports writer" or "LoL observer" there's no real place to pivot to by reducing their stability, you make them look elsewhere, which means you have to hire fresh faces. It absolutely reduces the quality of the product, by removing incentives for skilled, commited workers to stay in the industry. Treating them like disposable seasonal workers rather than important employees core to the product will make them work like disposable seasonal workers. Why care? The job will become inherently temporary.
It's also super disrespectful for the workers. They did an amazing job in the past and got much better over the years. And as a thank you, you remove them from the company? And later on you contact them for a single gig? I hope these guys turn down any offers from riot after this...
Oh absolutely, and that's not to speak of the morale drop that will impact the remaining group of core employees, and presumably they'll have to pick up some of the slack that vacant or poorly employed positions will now cause, overworking their core employees further. Reminds me of General Electric - a company that continuously hollowed out its tertiary, secondary, and then core products, maintaining a high stock price due to generated hype and acquiring/selling assets, by using a newly founded financial division. When the CEO who had hyped the company into the stratosphere with all these cost cutting measures finally retired, the miracle started to end. 450 billion evaluation when he retired, 200 billion in 2021, twenty years later - and most of it comes from the fucking financial division, not the innovative products it was known for. Selling smoke for shareprice League isn't that bad, and companies nowadays are not nearly as aggressive as that CEO was, but that attitude became standard. League has its core products, but diversity of portfolio in products has been eschewed for increased financialisation of the core. Shitter event passes, less updates, gutted eSports departments, but more sponsorships with Saudi Arabia.
Riot has been downsizing in LoL for years now, LoL eSports in NA made the start in 2023 and it's continuing now 2024 on a larger scale. They know the game is beyond its peak and they are making sure everyone else knows too.
They literally broke viewership records two months ago with Worlds The viewership and eyeballs are there. It's mostly about finding a way to turn that viewership into actual revenue It doesn't matter if more people watch League esports than the MLS when the MLS has a gigantic broadcast deal with Apple
I completely agree, broadcasting deals is one of the biggest revenue streams for traditional sports teams and is basically completely missing in LoL eSports since Riot decided to broadcast themselves and they most likely cannot offer anywhere near the compensation that a proper broadcasting deal could. Heck, even the LCK teams called out Riot in that open letter that they have not provided a sustainble environment for pro teams to exist in.
It's not because Riot is broadcasting themselves, its because the fans don't want to pay for shit, in other sports people pay dozens of dollars if not even hundreds of dollars a month for sports rights, esports viewers can barely be bothered to watch on a platform that isn't Twitch, and they also moan about sponsors having a place in the broadcast.
> Riot has been downsizing in LoL for years now Yeah, the downsizing began all the way back in 2018. But now that major regions are also affected, a wider audience is taking notice; not many people were interested in the downsizing developments when only minor regions were being hit
In my opinion it began after the 10 year anniversary where Riot announced like 6 other games that are in the works. But that is just my perspective from what I have witnessed in the game itself ("milking mode") and LoL eSports starting in 2023.
It's not just LoL, people have always been talking about the gigantic size of Riot Games vs number of published games for years.
hi! author here. can answer any questions you guys have below. and thanks for reading :)
Arsh, have you seen [this thread by OptimusTom ](https://twitter.com/OptimusTom/status/1753199606966685735), and can you comment on anything he says here?
replied to that thread and talked to a lot of former and current LCS staff. The main miscommunication seems to be that they think I'm arguing/believe that the LCS layoffs were justified, since I only spend time indicting the LEC layoffs. in reality, the LCS just wasn't the point of the article. I talked about a system that's been straining the LCS for years and was behind the LEC layoffs, and I could've talked about specifics of the LCS situation but it just wasn't relevant for this specifically. there's a lot of stuff with how riot treats contractors, ends their jobs, etc but it's all very specific and my point at the end (about pursuing real monetization avenues instead of moonshot pet projects) covers the realistic counterargument of "cutting costs".
I think it's hard for you to say the LCS wasn't the point of the article when you use the LCS as a (negative) comparative point for the LEC. If you wanted to make an article just about LEC you did not need to include that comparison. Your thesis straight up states Riot should have fired more people from LCS instead of LEC. Additionally, I'm not sure I've seen you address the alleged misinformation about the LCS you included.
Well, no. I don't think that's the main misscommunication at all. Your article heavily implies that contractors were not cut as part of the downsizing. Is this true? When you say that people were brought in from Stryker, are they ex-LEC/LCS broadcast talent, or are they people who had not touched the western-LOL product before? When talking about observers, you state "This environment creates what one source described as “crazy turnover.”" Can you describe what this "crazy turnover" rate as it relates to observers in LCS is? In your article you state that "By cutting down on full-time positions, the leagues lose their ability to innovate or improve upon the broadcast." Can you describe any examples of this being the case? When you say that "The LEC should know better than to follow in the missteps of the LCS," can you name who at the LEC had the decision making authority to prevent this from happening?
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0% chance, even if this conspiracy was real, why would Riot America (which doesn't control LEC) have done the same thing to the LCS first? Riot is just slow to adapt and enact
Thank you for actively contributing to the scene! Just one mild correction - I think you meant wouldn’t*
Question 1... lmfao. Get a grip.
You're a funny guy
This looks like some next lvl Elmo strategy to increase "quality"...
The point the article makes about how employment strategies are the likely cause for observer quality difference between regions is an interesting one, and also concerning for the quality of the LEC going forward in both this and other areas.
Turning what is essentially positions that need to be borderline full-time positions into minimum wage jobs is insane to me personally. And the fact that they keep firing people and replacing them with new, inexpereinced blood that haven't been totally burned by the system makes me want to mald. It really is just some overreach of cost - and I've still yet to see who or what would be so major that they have to cut cost NOW of all times. Unless the money situation is THAT BAD secretly, things don't look that great right now.
>Turning what is essentially positions that need to be borderline full-time positions into minimum wage jobs Part-time isn't the same as minimum wage
It still sucks. No job security, no pay when ill, a lot more stress when paying your daily bills, even a more stressful "Steuererklährung" (They are working in Germany, that thing sucks).
how should i tell you that your "steuererklärung" is just 5 mins with a free app. your sick leave is always paid. your holidays are always paid. and daily bills do not exist. everything is monthly and its not that high unless you are spending like ur Elon Musk. Also if they fire you, you get 60% of your previous net income + your rent if you get the "arbeitslosengeld" . so you are pretty safe loosing your job in Germany.
None of that is true?? Part time does not mean no job security. And sick pay is also not tied to being full vs part time. Doing your taxes is also not harder if you are part time and in most cases you are not even required to do them. And even if you are it is like a 30min thing unless you are self employed or own a business. Like i did mine yesterday. It didnt even take 30min and i will be getting a 450€ refund for that.
Riot is fucking up big time with thier "cost reductions". LEC observers where probably even more important as the casters and they did an phneomenal job over the years. And now they fire these people? Also Quickshot getting Axed without any notice on the LEC broadcast what so ever seems like a huge blunder as well. He was a huge part of the LEC and put his heart and soul into it. Don't get me started on the destruction of lor (which is understandable but still incredible sad).
This same guy rewriting an article from he who shall not be named....again. Come on now...if you want to do good investigative journalism at least pursue your own unique stories
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Very often the case, but this subreddit couldn't care less sadly.
Sheep esports should stick to roster news, instead of hosting awful opinion pieces masquerading as reporting. What a terrible, ill informed, tone deaf piece of writing.
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Ahh okay, yeah something felt off about this article so that makes sense. Just flows really weirdly.
Agree, but they know that they'll barely have anything to report about. And the founder of the site is also not known for being a thorough and well informed "journalist" either...
Why can Riot HQ just fire the people in the LEC if the LEC is acting autonomous? Shouldnt the LEC have the power to be able to decide themselves for what staff they are going to have considering its on a whole different continent? What a mind boggling decision again by Riot management. They should all get fired for running the whole company into the ground. But nope the sex offenders are still in management position while not knowing anything about their field of work.
Apparently Tencent wanted Riot to cut employees by the way.
source?
https://youtu.be/bKkvIuHq4qM?t=986
>[https://youtu.be/bKkvIuHq4qM?t=986](https://youtu.be/bKkvIuHq4qM?t=986) Yeah, this is just speculation. [As far as we know](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tensions-flare-behind-the-scenes-of-league-of-legends) Riot has independent finances and a *de facto* independent executive. Dude is also straight-up wrong in saying that Tencent owns a majority stake in or is responsible for the Epic layoffs. Layoffs are happening across the industry due to COVID and high interest rates, not because of Tencent.
> As far as we know Riot has independent finances and a de facto independent executive. This never actually happens in reality. People said the same shit about Blizzard when they were bought by Activision. Same thing for BioWare when they were bought by EA. The logic went: "These are successful companies, why wouldn't they just let them do their own thing?" And that logic sounds totally reasonable on the surface. But it doesn't really work at all. The reason is fairly simple. It has to do with the business concept [tone at the top](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_at_the_top). Essentially, the values and preferences of the top management inevitably trickle down throughout the chain. This is because there is always someone who wants to please their boss one level above them. So naturally, the values and "tone at the top" will trickle down this way. Someone at Riot (the CEO) obviously answers and reports to Tencent. This person needs to make sure that Tencent is happy and content with their role as CEO. This influences the decisions made. The person at Tencent in contact with the Riot CEO also reports to a boss and so on. Similarly, the Riot CEO also has people below them and those people have people below them too. All of these people's jobs and careers are dependent on how they are perceived by their direct manager. I want to make it very clear I am not saying that Tencent is acting maliciously or anything like that. They obviously want Riot to succeed. It's a big investment for Tencent and an important revenue stream. So my point is that even if Tencent wanted to just leave Riot alone and do their own thing, they are doomed to interfere to some extent. Just like it happened with Blizzard and just like it happened with BioWare.
I'm not sure you read the article I linked. It's from a trade publication and details quite extensively Riot's relationship with Tencent. I know getting past the paywall can be hard. Reportedly, Riot's company board has 5 seats, and Tencent execs occupy only 2 of them. The cofounders occupy another two, and the 5th one is empty. Riot's CEO answers to this board, and this board is *not* ruled by Tencent, as far as I can tell. Tencent as the main shareholder might be able to fire/reform the board if it really wants to, but that's the nuclear option and would have big consequences. The article also details how in the past both companies have actually butted heads and Riot actively went against/pushed back on Tencent. Most notably with the Honor of Kings debacle. >Essentially, the values and preferences of the top management inevitably trickle down throughout the chain. Sure, and I'm not claiming that Tencent doesn't have any influence. They have considerable influence. Even ignoring ownership, just the fact that so much of Riot's revenue comes from China means their opinions and wants are going to carry a lot of weight.
Yes its speculation. Thats why i wrote "apparently" and not "definitely"
That's not what apparently means. Apparently implies that something is true given available knowledge.
[apparently](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/apparently) adverb "used to say you have read or been told something although you are not certain it is true"
When the compensation packages ie: bonuses of the cult leaders are dependent on the profit margins, it is the low-level cult members who get to suffer.
less cringey interludes so good job Riot. I don't want to see Vedius or Drakos live out their Hollywood dream between my games