Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends, has laid off 46 employees." The company has made "strategic shifts within several teams to narrow focus in a number of areas.

"With these shifts, certain roles have been eliminated, affecting a total of 46 Rioters," Riot said in a statement sent to PC Gamer.

"This is part of our normal operations: we regularly make changes to our structure and team based on what we believe will provide the best content and experience for our players.

"We never make these decisions lightly and always start from a place of wanting to keep the rioters engaged and focused on our top priorities. That may not always be possible, but that is our primary goal."

The layoffs, first reported by the Jacob Wolf Report (open in new tab), represent just 1% of Riot's total workforce, which currently stands at over 4,500 employees (open in new tab) in over 20 offices worldwide. According to Riot, most of the layoffs were made in the publishing division, with a few from the recruiting and esports divisions.

Riot also stated that they still have over 150 positions open at various studios, which may seem a bit odd given that they are laying people off at the same time. The studio said that it generally tries to retain and reassign employees, but that this time it is not possible due to a change in "strategic priorities" and that other unrelated positions have yet to be filled.

Riot's job cuts are the latest round of layoffs to hit the gaming and tech industries: Microsoft announced yesterday that it will lay off more than 10,000 employees (open in new tab), some of whom include 343 Industries and Bethesda They come from game studios, and CD Projekt (open in new tab), Coinbase (open in new tab), Unity (open in new tab), and Facebook parent Meta (open in new tab) have also made significant job cuts in recent months. The French labor union Solidaires Informatique also recently called a strike at Ubisoft Paris (opens in new tab), accusing Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot of planning "job cuts, discreet studio closures, pay cuts and fake layoffs."