The developer behind LoL, Riot Games, has announced that 530 employees will be laid off worldwide. Now they are also putting together plans for their own Twitch and talking about it. MeinMMO tells you what’s behind it.
Riot Games, known for the popular MOBA League of Legends, recently experienced a setback. They announced on The reason given is that many new employees have been hired for new projects since 2019, but these projects have not yielded the expected return.
The discontinued project also included its own livestream platform that was supposed to compete with Twitch.
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Riot Games planned its own Twitch, stomped it down again
What’s with the rejected idea? The project, estimated to have been in development for two years, was intended to provide an alternative to Twitch. In 2021, Riot Games acquired the company Kanga, which specialized in creating new forms of interaction between esports teams and their fans.
The idea of a separate platform that would compete directly with Twitch was an ambitious project. Riot Games invested resources and time in the project, which was to be launched under the name Riot Esports Network (REN). How much money was spent on the project is unknown – but it is estimated that it was a lot.
This platform should allow fans to watch professional players in games like LoL and Valorant. There were also plans to deeply integrate the platform with Riot Games’ games – for example, with rewards for players who actively watch live streams.
The reports of the failure came to light through research by the business website Bloomberg.
We’ve been testing a few watch platform ideas, but last week we decided to cancel our REN initiative, according to John Needham, President of Esports at Riot Games. You can read more about his vision for the rejected idea in the official Riot Games blog post.
Overall, the project was relatively unknown to the public, but was already in the internal test phase. After the announcement of the layoffs at Riot Games, other projects of the company were also abandoned, such as Riot Forge, the publishing label for games from indie developers – for example: Song of Nunu.
It’s not just Riot Games that decided on waves of layoffs, other companies in the games industry are also struggling with problems, including an important gaming studio: The most important German gaming studio for role-playing games is probably closing down