MARKET’S PLUNGE CONTINUES ON GLOBAL CONCERNS
S&P 500 tumbles 3.2 percent, adding to five-week decline
Wall Street’s relentless decline stretched into a sixth week Monday, fueled by new data from China that added to concerns about a global economy being battered by high inf lation, rising interest rates and a malfunctioning supply chain.
The S&P 500 fell 3.2 percent, adding to a downdraft that has knocked 16.3 percent off the index this year, including a five-week stretch of selling that is the market’s longest such decline in more than a decade.
The drop has stocks approaching a bear market, Wall Street’s term for a decline of 20 percent or more from recent highs, a retreat that serves as a marker of a severe shift in sentiment.
The Nasdaq pulled back 4.3 percent, and the Dow fell 2 percent.
The focus of attention Monday was China’s economy, after customs data showed that growth in the country’s exports slowed significantly in April and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang warned this weekend that the current state of the nation’s jobs market was “complicated and grave.”
The trade slowdown was a product of China’s efforts to contain a COVID-19 outbreak with lockdowns that have idled millions of workers, as well as weaker demand for Chinese-made products from the United
largest office tenants — at nearly 1 million square feet, with more on the way — as the video game industry evolves into a major economic player in Southern California. At the same time, Riot Games and the rest of the industry have been roiled by competition, a nascent labor movement and allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination.
Landlords eager to rent out blocks of office space are courting nearly 150 gaming companies in the region, including Riot Games and Activision Blizzard, maker of Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.
Los Angeles and Orange counties make up one of the dominant hubs of gaming content creation and esports, inhabiting 3.1 million square feet of offices in 2020. That total reflected growth of nearly 70 percent in five years, real estate brokerage CBRE said in a September report that estimated Riot Games’ annual revenue at $1.7 billion.
Riot Games is a private company and does not disclose revenue.
Riot Games’ headquarters on Olympic Boulevard in West L.A. is nearly invisible to passersby, much of it a discreetly walled-off campus where security is tight in order to safeguard work that can mushroom far beyond gaming into the riches promised by TV and film.
The Los Angeles Times got a rare look inside Riot Games’ home base, which gives off distinct movie studio vibes; among its showbiz elements are three theaters, two of which were previously used by legendary movie directors James Cameron and George Lucas.
There’s also a commissary called Noms that includes one of the biggest commercial kitchens on the Westside, serving a wide range of fare that changes daily and is provided free of charge to the company’s 3,100 employees, as are the drinks and snacks at Bilgewater and a smoothie bar. Also there for the taking are cereals, coffee, packaged snacks and other prepared fare at small food stations scattered throughout the sprawling campus.
A spot that does open to the public is a spacious auditorium built for esports
competition, where audiences watch professional teams of gamers clash on the virtual fields of League of Legends. Championship banners for such winners as Evil Geniuses and powerhouse Team SoloMid adorn the walls.
Their competitions are broadcast internationally. More than 10 million players in China compete at League of Legends daily, and the game is so popular in South Korea that it produces many of the world’s best professionals in the esport.
In tribute, the Riot Games campus includes a re-creation of a Korean gaming hall called PC Bang, where employees can play multiplayer computer games such as League of Legends — without the hourly fee that gaming hall patrons must pay. Rioters, as company employees are known, can get a feel of how their games are experienced by many Asian fans. Sitdown Mario Kart games are there to hop on just for the heck of it, and there’s an oldfashioned arcade around the corner.
Rioters can also play video games going back to the dawn of the industry in a library with decades of titles famous and obscure that may hold useful inspirations for elements of new games. The game library includes fat, old-technology televisions to play them on, which is sometimes necessary with titles such as 1984’s popular shooter Duck Hunt that interact
with their cathoderay tubes.
Another room has a custom-built table for playing Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop games.
Giant statues of Annie and Tibbers, characters from League of Legends, guard the main lobby, and statues of other well-known characters pop up elsewhere. Rooms have been set aside for meditation and yoga.
“The campus is sort of a balance between fun and productivity,” Riot Games President Dylan Jadeja said. “You’re trying to make sure people are able to get the most out of their time while they are here” — without feeling like the company is trying to squeeze as much work out of them as it can.
“We need it to be organic. That’s the nature of our product,” he said. “It has to happen from the people.”
Other perks include indoor and outdoor gyms, a track and a basketball court that is occupied by tented seating to increase outdoor dining capacity during the pandemic. Food-snatching pigeons are kept intimidated and at bay by the swooping hawks Melvin, Maya and Mowgli, who are managed by a falconer. (The humane bird abatement method is also employed at the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.)
Although the campus might strike workers who toil in conventional offices as unconscionably cool,
Jadeja insists that the features are appropriate for a successful tech company that wants to attract good talent. It’s important that the office environment is a source of pride for Rioters, he said.
“The flip side is, you also don’t want it to be a place that goes over the top, where there’s slides and swimming pools. We never went ‘massage parlor in every corner’ and all that stuff, because we felt like that wasn’t authentic to who we are,” Jadeja said.
“We’re sort of still a wellfunded startup,” he said of Riot Games, which is owned by Chinese technology and entertainment conglomerate Tencent. “Our aspirations are still sort of impossible.”
The engaging campus, he added, “helps us collaborate.”
Riot Games has labored in recent years to address allegations of a sexist “bro culture” at its headquarters that included women being passed over for promotions, unwanted sexual advances and men questioning women about the legitimacy of their video game fandom.
The company agreed in December to pay $100 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed in 2018 alleging pay disparity, gender discrimination and sexual harassment.
In a statement at the time, Riot said the company “was at the heart of what became a reckoning in our industry,”
and it “hadn’t always lived up to our values.”
According to 2020 statistics in the company’s last diversity and inclusion report, 24 percent of employees are women, and 29 percent of the executive team are women after new hiring practices were put in place.
Diversity and inclusion “is not meant to be a crisis function but rather a business strategy, and we have to constantly be present and active in bringing it to the forefront of everything we do,” Chief Diversity Officer Angela Roseboro said in a statement.
After working remotely during the pandemic, Rioters returned to their offices last month on a Tuesdaythrough-Thursday schedule. They can come in Mondays and Fridays if they want to.
The team members managed to perform well outside of the office when they had to, Jadeja said, but it wasn’t the optimum way to operate.
“Strategically, we felt that the collaboration model, the creativity that we needed in our business and the spirit of our company necessitated in-office culture,” Jadeja said.
The company spent $100 million improving its rented spaces to create an environment that conjures pleasant aspects of college, he said — “the nostalgic elements of walking across the campus at any school and running into friends and stopping.”
There are 240 conference rooms, which can be reserved electronically, with names referencing Riot Games fantasy properties, including Valorant, a firstperson shooter game launched in 2020 that has more than 15 million monthly players.
One uncommon expense Riot Games took on when building out its offices was laying power and data cables under the floor in large expanses. Portable walls and full-size heavy desks with monitors are mounted on wheels and can be quickly rolled into clusters for team projects nearby or across the campus.
The setup costs as much as 15 percent more than a typical office and at first seemed like an extravagant expense, Jadeja said, but the fluidity allows teams to rapidly huddle and work on urgent issues such as a glitch in a game that is frustrating players.
Video game companies have needs beyond those of typical office tenants, said Greg Lovett of real estate brokerage Cresa, who represents gaming industry tenants.
Among those needs are lots and lots of power, with enough circuits to prevent work-halting overloads and backup generators if they’re operating live games. Riot Games’ headquarters is a global broadcasting hub and has a backup generator for its backup generators, the company said.
Gaming tenants need to be able to operate heating and air conditioning around the clock, Lovett said, and have enough privacy to protect the secrecy of their projects, which can climb in value well beyond their gaming applications.
Fantasy worlds created for games have enormous fan bases that movie and television producers have grown eager to capitalize on, Lovett said.
Netflix streams the animated series “Arcane,” a spinoff of League of Legends that has a 100 percent rating from Rotten Tomatoes and a second season in the works. Another recent hit for Netflix was “The Witcher,” a fantasy series based on a role-playing video game.
“Halo,” a military science fiction television series streaming on Paramount+, is based on the popular Halo video game franchise created by Bungie.
“The big hit is when you take your original intellectual property and do multiple things with it,” Lovett said.