Game developer behind League of Legends to lay off about 530 people

Tencent Holding’s Riot Games plans to lay off 530 employees, or about 11 per cent of staff, according to a company blog and letter to employees.

“This isn’t to appease shareholders or to hit a quarterly earnings number it’s a necessity,” the League of Legends maker said Monday in the post, acknowledging it had “more than doubled in headcount” over the last several years.

Chief executive officer Dylan Jadeja said in a memo that Riot Games has made “a number of big bets across the company,” including new games.

For its first 14 years, the company primarily operated League of Legends, still one of the most popular games of all time. “Today, we’re a company without a sharp enough focus, and simply put, we have too many things underway.”

Riot will reduce the size of the Legends of Runeterra team, acknowledging the game hasn’t performed as well as it had hoped. Development work on the game Bandle Tale will stop.

Unity Software and Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch have also cut jobs in recent weeks.