Riot Games

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Riot Games

"Riot Games' Logo and Headquarters" Site Type Corporation Launch Date 2009 Status Active Product Line League of Legends Valorant Arcane Platform Mac Windows Website www.riotgames.com

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iot Games is a software company known primarily for their mainstream popular video games League of Legends and Valorant. Founded in 2006 by Brandon Beck and Mark Merrill, they released League of Legends in 2009 and Valorant in 2020 as well as some smaller, spin-off games. Riot Games also hosts a number of esports tournaments and have worked with Fortiche Productions to release Arcane, a TV series focused on two playable characters in League of Legends.

History

Riot Games' was founded to "develop, publish, and support the most player-focused games in the world" according to their website. They have headquarters in Los Angelos, California, and currently have over 3,000 employees worldwide. Founders Brandon Beck and Mark Merrill met at the University of South California where they took classes together. Both Merrill and Beck worked at banks after college, but eventually realized that wasn't what they wanted. The two had connected together over their love for video games, specifically Warcraft 3's Defense of the Ancient: Allstars and Starcraft's Aeons of Strife, both of which were community made mods for their games which resembled the very first Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs). In fact, Riot Games would hire one of the developers of DotA: Allstars as one of their first employees, and League of Legends main competitor today Dota 2 was designed by the founder of Defense of the Ancients: Allstars after he was hired by Valve. Along with creating the first mainstream MOBA, Beck and Merrill were also hoping to continually update their game after it had been released, as well as release it entirely for free and earn money solely based off of in game purchases (micro-transactions). At the time, this was a completely new business model, now known as games as a service. As they were developing League of Legends (at the time called Onslaught) in 2007, they had been meeting with publisher after publisher, none of whom seemed to really get on board with the "freemium" model. Finally, they realized that they were going to have to publish their own game, which they did in 2009. They have continued to grow their studio and update League throughout the years, releasing several small games along the way, until releasing Valorant in 2020.

Esports

Riot Games hosts a number of esports leagues, the most well known of which is the League of Legends World Championship. This event is the among most watched sports events in the world, and had over 100 million unique viewers in 2019, making it the most popular esport.. In 2021, the prize pool was $2,250,000 USD and had 22 teams compete. In order to qualify, each team needs to place highly in their own regional esports league, which Riot Games also hosts. The total prize pool for all League esports in 2019 was around 9.15 million USD

Riot Games also hosts esports leagues for Valorant, of which, like the League of Legends World Championship, culminate in the Valorant Champions tournament. It debuted in 2021, and crowned its first ever winners, a team known as Acend. This tournament has a slightly smaller prize pool of around $600,000 USD but this could be due to it being the tournament's nascent year.

Ethical Issues

Tencent

Tencent is a Chinese corporation mostly known for being the biggest corporation in the gaming industry and for their ownership of and stakes in large video game companies such as Epic Games, SuperCell and Riot Games. Tencent has also earned criticism from the United States government for it's apps WeChat and TikTok that, according to a letter from the White House, "automatically capture vast swaths of information from its users" and could possibly allow the Chinese Communist Party to "conduct corporate espionage". In August 2020, the White House issued an executive order prohibiting transactions with both WeChat and TikTok. Tencent is also notorious for copying games. Its CEO, Ma Huateng has famously been quoted as saying "[to] copy is not evil". Some experts, such as Abishur Prakash, co-founder of the Center for Innovating the Future, are worried about Tencent using games to "export its culture" and "build a new kind of global power" while others, such as Steven Bailey, an analyst at Omida, have noted that "Chinese companies have had involvement in various Western game companies and content for quite some time, and understand that successfully making games for the West will not be supported by such changes."

Vanguard

Vanguard will be talked about here if needed.

Sexual Harassment and Discrimination

In 2018, Riot Games was sued for sexual harassment and gender discrimination by Melanie McCracken and Jess Negrón, who filed a class-action lawsuit against the firm alleging sexual harassment and misconduct as well as gender discrimination. The suit was eventually settled in 2019 for $100,000,000 USD, with 20% going to the plaintiffs legal fees. Part of the settlement also promises workplace policy changes, many of which are focused on making pay more transparent.

The suit followed an exposé by Kotaku which stated that women at Riot had historically had great difficulties getting jobs in leadership positions, and the "bro" culture of the firm meant that there was high female turnover. Many former women employees interviewed about their experience at Riot Games couldn't speak publicly due to policy agreements forbidding employees from disparaging the company. Additionally, an employee named Lacy asked a male coworker to present one of her ideas that was shot down just a few days ago. He presented the idea in the same manner she did, and was praised for it.

The Kotaku article also claims that after Riot learned about it, only days after they added a diversity and inclusion page to their website which cites the company's "zero tolerance" policy for harassment and discrimination. When asked about this, Riot claimed this page had been in their Roadmap since April of last year and was therefore not connected to the Kotaku article.

Another woman alleges that when she was applying for a job at Riot, she felt as if she was being aggressively challenged about whether or not she actually played games and how long she had played them, including questions about her favorite trinket from a World of Warcraft event that had taken place 11 years prior. She was hired despite hearing from an informant later that her interviewer "didn't think she had the 'grit'". Kotaku noted that Riot's career page, which until that past June, had claimed to want to hire 'passionate gamers who are talented professionals', adding that potential applicants need to have the 'horsepower' to excel at Riot. Those statements have since been removed. Riot also sent a statement to Kotaku reading 'we must over-index on cultural reinforcement'. This notion of hiring only 'core' gamers, leads to a decrease in the number of talented women hired who interviewers don't think fit the ideal of a Rioter.

A month before the lawsuit was filed, Riot hired Frances Frei, who was Uber's former senior vice president, in an attempt to fix the issue. Harassment bad