Riot Games announces major internal reshuffling

League of Legends and VALORANT developer Riot Games has announced significant changes to its internal structure.

As part of the inner-company changes, Riot Games’ President of Esports, John Needham, has become the new President of Publishing and Esports. The change will see Needham oversee a combined team that includes members of staff from publishing, esports, platform technology and music.

John Needham was promoted to President of Esports in 2021 and oversaw all of Riot’s esports titles and operations. Previous to this Needham joined Riot Games in 2017 and worked as the Head of the League of Legends European Championship (LEC), and Managing Director in both Europe and North America.

Riot Games’ TV and film development, which includes hit show Arcane on Netflix, will now be led by two studios divided into live-action and animated. These new studios will be led by Christian Linke (animation) and Brian Wright (live-action).

Linke has intimate knowledge of Riot’s operations within animated TV as he has been the co-creator, showrunner, and executive producer of the award-winning animated series Arcane. In his new role, he will aim to continue from the success of Arcane and work collaboratively with Fortiche Production as the head of the animation studio.

Meanwhile, Wright will be in charge of developing new live-action projects. He previously joined the company just after the launch of Arcane and has been working since 2021 on creating ideas for TV series based on the pre-existing lore of the company’s titles. Wright has vast experience in this space from his time at Netflix where he worked on series such as Stranger Things, The Umbrella Academy, and Shadow and Bone.

According to Riot Games, the aim behind the restructuring is to expand the company’s influence both inside of esports and gaming and extend it within music and publishing.

Dylan Jadeja, the CEO of Riot Games, spoke on the new changes: “For the past year, we’ve been working to re-orient our organization and structure to serve players in a more aligned way. We want every moment a player spends with us to be worth it – and that’s best achieved when we authentically blend our games, esports, music and storytelling into really cohesive, immersive adventures for them.

“Today marks another step on that journey. John, Christian, and Brian are all incredible leaders and dedicated Rioters who care deeply about players. I have no doubt that, together with our game development teams, they will dream up even more memorable and defining moments players and Rioters can be proud of.”