I work for Riot Games. It’s a great company to work for, and I’m really happy with the work culture & team, and I have good friends at work. Everyone’s super smart! I’m a software engineer, working mostly on UI stuff for social features such as voice chat, parties, friend systems, etc.
There’s no culture of overtime; there’s a lot of care in looking after people and making sure we don’t get burned out. Sometimes there are urgent deadlines – that happens, it’s software engineering after all. But things return to normal afterwards and we get time off when we’ve worked overtime.
There’s a lot of collaboration between different offices: I’m in Sydney and regularly work with people in the US. There’s a morning overlap which is the afternoon for them – we do a lot of meetings and collaboration and handoff. Then in our afternoons we get focus time.
There’s a very strong playtest culture: we play our games a lot and I’m not alone in playing in our spare time. We care a lot about our games and the players. I read the Valorant subreddit pages all the time, and try not to take the comments about lazy devs personally.
I worked on Valorant for several years. It was the first multiplayer game I’d ever tried and I still play every day in my spare time – a couple of Deathmatches, maybe a swiftplay. I’ve gradually worked my way up from Iron to Bronze, but I’m an old fella with ADHD and a family, so there are some aspects that take longer for me than for a lot of other players. And that’s okay! The game is fun, I care about its future and I do a lot of talking with other players to sus out the mood.
There are some things I can’t talk about. In the early days of Riot games, developers would sometimes talk about upcoming features and players would get excited for them. Then maybe the feature would change or be delayed and players would be unhappy.
We do a lot of internal playtesting – a LOT – and sometimes we realise when we’re doing something that it has to change. There can be a lot of reasons a feature changes! So now we don’t talk about unreleased stuff in advance. It’s also nice when we can surprise players with something they like.
So I’m generally not going to answer questions about “when are you going to do this feature”. Sometimes it’ll be in the works, sometimes it’s something not enough players want, sometimes it’s technically not work the effort, sometimes I don’t know the answer… there can be a lot of different situations!
But I’m happy to talk about some of the things that we have released that I had some level of involvement in.