Riot Games facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
Riot Games, Inc.

Logo used since 2022
Riot Games' West Los Angeles headquarters (pictured in December 2023)
Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Video games
Founded	September 2006; 18 years ago (2006-09) in Santa Monica, California, US
Founders	Brandon Beck Marc Merrill
Headquarters	Los Angeles , US
Number of locations	20 offices (2023)
Key people	Brandon Beck (co-chairman) Marc Merrill (co-chairman) Dylan Jadeja (CEO) Mark Sottosanti (CFO)
Products	League of Legends League of Legends: Wild Rift Legends of Runeterra Teamfight Tactics Valorant
Number of employees	4,200+ (2024)
Parent	Tencent (2011–present)
Divisions	Riot Tabletop
Subsidiaries	Radiant Entertainment Hypixel Studios Riot Sydney
Primary ASN 6507

Riot Games, Inc. is an American video game developer, publisher, and esports tournament organizer based in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in September 2006 by Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill to develop League of Legends and went on to develop several spin-off games and the unrelated first-person shooter game Valorant. In 2011, Riot Games was acquired by Chinese conglomerate Tencent. Its publishing arm, Riot Forge, oversaw the production of League of Legends spin-offs by other developers, until its shut down in January 2024. The company worked with Fortiche to release Arcane, a television series based on the League of Legends universe.

Riot Games operates 12 international League of Legends esports leagues, the League of Legends World Championship and the Valorant Champions Tour. The company, which had 20 offices worldwide as of 2023, sells corporate sponsorships, merchandise, and streaming rights for its leagues. Riot has faced allegations and lawsuits claiming a toxic workplace culture. The company was criticized for its use of forced arbitration in response to these allegations.

History

Brandon "Ryze" Beck and Marc "Tryndamere" Merrill, the founders of Riot Games, became friends while roommates at the University of Southern California, where the two studied business. Beck and Merrill believed too many video game developers diverted their focus from game to game too often, distinguishing Defense of the Ancients as an indication that games could be supported and monetized long-term. They also drew inspiration from Asian video game designers who released their games for no up-front cost, and instead charged for additional perks.

Beck and Merrill sought funding from family and angel investors, raising US$1.5 million to launch their company. Riot Games was established in September 2006 in Santa Monica, California. The first person Riot Games recruited was Steve "Guinsoo" Feak, one of the early developers of DotA Allstars, a game considered to have been foundational to the MOBA genre. As they refined League of Legends' initial creation, they pitched investors a video game company rooted in e-commerce. Merrill said that they approached publishers who were baffled by the game's lack of a single-player mode and free-to-play business model. Riot Games received several rounds of funding totaling $8 million, including investments by the Benchmark and FirstMark Capital venture capital firms, as well as Chinese holding company Tencent. The latter would later become League of Legends' distributor in China, and then the parent company of Riot Games.

Following six months of beta tests, Riot Games released League of Legends as a free-to-play game on October 27, 2009. Their game designers and executives participated in online forums to make adjustments based on player feedback. On May 10, 2010, Riot Games announced that they would take over distribution and operation of their game in Europe; to do so, Riot Games relocated their European headquarters in Brighton to new offices in Dublin. In February 2011, Tencent invested $400 million for a 93 percent stake in Riot Games. Tencent bought the remaining 7 percent on December 16, 2015; the price was not disclosed.

In 2012, in response to toxicity in League of Legends, Riot Games launched a "player behavior team" of psychologists to combat harassment on its platform. Riot Games' tactics to address issues on League of Legends, which included an opt-in chat function between opposing players, informing banned players of the reasoning behind the ban, as well as creating a tribunal of players to weigh in on bans, resulted in a 30 percent drop in reported harassment behavior. The efficacy of their results has been questioned by players and the gaming press. By 2013, League of Legends was the most-played multiplayer PC game in the world. By 2016, Inc. reported the game had over 100 million monthly players.

Riot Games relocated to a new building on a 20-acre (8 hectare) campus in western Los Angeles in 2015. In March 2016, Riot Games acquired Radiant Entertainment, another developer who was working on Rising Thunder and Stonehearth at the time. Rising Thunder was effectively canceled following the acquisition, with the game's team allocated to a new project. On October 13, 2017, Beck and Merrill announced that they were returning their focus to developing games, aiming to create new experiences for video game and esports players. Beck and Merrill handed over the day-to-day operations and overall management of the League of Legends team to three longtime employees: Dylan Jadeja, Scott Gelb, and Nicolo Laurent, who previously served as chief financial officer (CFO), chief technology officer (CTO) and president, respectively. Subsequently, Gelb and Laurent assumed roles as chief operating officer (COO) and chief executive officer (CEO), respectively, while Beck and Merrill became the Riot Games' chairmen. As of May 2018^[update], Riot Games employed 2,500 people, operating 24 offices around the world.

In October 2019, Riot Games announced several new games: a version of League of Legends for mobile devices and consoles called League of Legends: Wild Rift, a standalone mobile version of the Teamfight Tactics mode from League of Legends, and the digital collectible card game titled Legends of Runeterra, with all three scheduled for a 2020 release. The company also teased further games — Project A, a tactical shooter; Project L, a fighting game with League of Legends characters; and Project F, a multiplayer game set in Runeterra – that were not detailed outside of genre descriptions and brief gameplay clips. Project A was later revealed to be Valorant, which entered closed beta on April 7, 2020 and was officially released on June 2, 2020.

In December 2019, Riot Games announced Riot Forge, a publishing label headed by Leanne Loombe. The label partnered with smaller game development studios for the creation of League of Legends games, with some games of this type already being in development. Two titles from Riot Forge were announced at The Game Awards 2019: Ruined King: A League of Legends Story by Airship Syndicate, and Convergence: A League of Legends Story by Double Stallion Games. Another division, Riot Tabletop, was announced in January 2020, to producing tabletop games; the first was Tellstones: King's Gambit, released in 2020.

Riot acquired Hypixel Studios in April 2020, which they had been investing in over the previous eighteen months to help them publish Hytale, a voxel-based sandbox game. Also in April, Riot announced plans to establish a Singapore office later that year. Riot Games Singapore is to support Riot's existing titles and will have a major focus on developing the company's newer titles. Jason Bunge was hired as Riot Games' chief marketing officer in October 2020. In October 2021, the company bought Kanga, a services firm involved in "fan hubs", merchandising, and content aggregation.

Riot Games collaborated with French animation studio Fortiche to release an animated series, Arcane. The series was released worldwide in November 2021 on Netflix, and by parent company Tencent in China, and received a favorable critical reception. In March 2022, Riot Games announced that it had invested in Fortiche and, as a result, its chief content officer Brian Wright and director of corporate development Brendan Mulligan were joining Fortiche's board of directors. That same month, Riot also hired executives from Netflix, Paramount, and HBO Max to head development of film, TV, and music endeavors built around the company's intellectual property.

In October 2022, Riot acquired Wargaming Sydney—a subsidiary of Cyprus-based Wargaming that had originally developed the MMO middleware BigWorld—for an undisclosed amount, and renamed it Riot Sydney. The acquisition excludes rights to the BigWorld technology itself, as well as its publishing arm.

In January 2023, Riot Games cut 46 employees in a round of layoffs. In the same month, it suffered a cyberattack that stole source code for League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, and an anti-cheat platform. The hackers in question put the stolen data up for sale on the dark web for US$700,000. In 2023, several games under the Riot Forge label were released, including The Mageseeker by Digital Sun, and Song of Nunu by Tequila Works. In September 2023, Dylan Jadeja became company CEO.

Riot announced in January 2024 that it would be laying off 530 employees, or about 11% of its workforce, as well as sunsetting the Riot Forge effort as well as its planned Twitch competitor, Riot Esports Network (REN). Jadeja stated the rationale for the layoffs: "A decision like this has a massive impact on people's lives and on the culture of Riot. We're not doing this to appease shareholders or to hit some quarterly earnings number – we've made this decision because it's a necessity. It's what we need to do in order to maintain a long-term focus for players." In May 2024, the company was sued in the California federal court over its partnership with bankrupt crypctocurrency exchange FTX. Lawyers for the plaintiff said the claims were brought as their losses from FTX could not be recovered due to the bankruptcy proceedings.

Esports

The stage for the 2017 League of Legends World Championship finals between SK Telecom T1 and Samsung Galaxy in the Beijing National Stadium

Riot Games operates esports leagues worldwide. This includes the League of Legends Championship Series, comprising leagues in North America and Europe. In total, there are more than 100 teams in Riot Games' 12 regional leagues around the world. Teams compete over the course of a season separated into two seasonal splits. Teams earn championship points to qualify for two major international competitions: the Mid-Season Invitational and the League of Legends World Championship. Riot Games' World Championship is the annual professional tournament at the conclusion of each season.

During 2010 and 2011, the Riot Games team developed new content for League of Legends; it was during this time that the company realized that people also liked to watch the game being played. As a result, Riot Games established its own League of Legends esports leagues which produce weekly broadcasts and create a professional game schedule. Following Riot Games' first world championship event in 2011, a small affair at a conference in Sweden, the company decided to turn their tournaments into professional sports-like events. It invested in broadcasting equipment, hired sports programming producers, and trained pro gamers to be "TV-ready". In 2012, Riot Games held its tournament at University of Southern California's Galen Center, offering $1 million in prize money. Riot Games has since held tournaments in Berlin, Seoul, Madison Square Garden in New York City, and the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

The company sells corporate sponsorships, merchandise, and streaming rights for its esports league. In 2015, investors bought stakes in teams and began building their own squads. Among the team owners in Riot Games' leagues are the owners of the Washington Wizards, Cleveland Cavaliers, Houston Rockets, Golden State Warriors, Philadelphia 76ers, Los Angeles Dodgers, AOL co-founder Steve Case, and life coach Tony Robbins. Inc. cited the growth of the leagues and high-profile ownership as part of its reasoning for making Riot Games its 2016 Company of the Year. Following debates over whether pro players and coaches should have a greater share of Riot Games' esports revenue and concerns raised about the company making in-game changes prior to matches, the company issued an open letter in 2016 promising higher revenue shares and more collaboration with professional teams. In 2017, Riot Games held the League of Legends World Championship in China, with the finals taking place in Beijing. The same year, the company announced it would franchise its ten-team North American League of Legends Championship Series, which cost at least $10 million to enter.

In November 2020, Riot Games announced the first Valorant Champions Tour, the global competitive tournament for Valorant.

In 2021, Riot began building out three new "remote broadcast centers" in Asia, North America (Seattle), and Europe (Dublin), as part of an effort to improve the scale of its esports productions using a centralized production model with regional hubs. The facilities would be capable of both on-site productions, and allowing regional productions to connect to the facilities' datacenters and use their infrastructure as part of remote productions. The three locations were chosen as their time zones are each eight hours apart, allowing them to "work a full shift and then shut down and throw control for the next productions to the next facility." The first RBC in Dublin, Ireland, opened in July 2022, in a building formerly housed by the nightclub The Wright Venue in Swords; it has an IP-based infrastructure, six studios, and preserves the nightclub's disco ball (which had been promoted as the largest in Europe).

As part of their buildout of the LoL series, Riot partnered with the FTX cryptocurrency exchange in August 2021 for a seven-year deal. Following the bankruptcy of FTX in November 2022, Riot began to seek legal methods to terminate the FTX contract.

Litigation

In 2017, Riot Games filed a lawsuit against Moonton Technology Co., the developer of the mobile game Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, because of copyright infringement, citing similarities between Mobile Legends and League of Legends. The case was initially dismissed in California on account of forum non conveniens. Tencent, on behalf of Riot Games, then filed a new lawsuit in a Chinese court, which ruled in Tencent's favor in July 2018, awarding it $2.9 million in damages.

In October 2019, Riot Games filed a lawsuit against Riot Squad Esports LLC, a Chicago-based esports organization founded in March 2019, alleging that Riot Squad intentionally infringed on Riot Games' "Riot" trademark.

Games

Minigames

Riot Forge

Tabletop games

In October 2016, Riot Games released Mechs vs. Minions, a cooperative tabletop game based on League of Legends. Riot's first tabletop game under Riot Tabletop was Tellstones: King's Gambit, a bluffing game for two or four players, released in 2020.

See also

In Spanish: Riot Games para niños