Accused of a sexist work culture, has Riot Games changed? A newly hired director describes

About a week ago, Riot Games dropped a volley of bombshell announcements. Now officially 10-years-young, the American video game studio marked their coming-of-age by (finally) releasing more major properties beyond their flagship money-maker, League of Legends (LOL). 

There’s Legends of Runeterra, their foray into free-to-play strategy card games. There’s League of Legends: Wild Rift, their other multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) built for mobile and console gaming. There’s Teamfight Tactics, their take on the burgeoning auto chess genre that’ll be a standalone mobile game. And an animated series set in the LOL universe, because why not. 

All this on top of untitled projects in the works that’ll move beyond MOBA, including a hero-based tactical shooter, a fighting game, an esports management simulator, as well as something that appears to be a dungeon crawler. 

If these announcements aren’t Riot’s declaration of war, I don’t know what is. Overnight, the developer transformed from a one-trick pony into a many-headed beast, directly baring its teeth at the likes of Activision Blizzard, Valve, and anyone else with skin in the metaphorical game. 

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7BLtQHYY7g[/embed]

Faced with a thick portfolio of games (technically, not really — Riot has been working on them for years), the studio needed someone to handle the monumental task of rolling them out in Asia, a market that’s currently enjoying exponential growth in esports and gaming. 

That job fell on Jennifer Poulson, Riot’s newly-ordained Head of Growth & Launch in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan. 

No pressure at all. 

Portrait of a (gaming) lady

Jennifer does not look like someone who’s a grizzled battle-scarred veteran in the video games industry. She looks chic, for one, radiating an air of approachable-yet-professional amiability no doubt perfected after over 16 years in public relations. Her extensive career belies her youthful appearance and lively vocal cadence — her age an enigma, remaining undisclosed in the dozens of interviews she’s given in the past. 

She is a gamer though, through and through. Having grown up in Tokyo, video games have always been a constant in her childhood, with Mario and Kirby on the Nintendo Super Famicom (or the Super Nintendo Entertainment System as it’s known outside of Japan) forming her earliest gaming memories. 

With an American father and a Japanese mother, she grew up embracing both cultures — her studies in Japan were punctuated with summer trips to New York to visit family. After a couple of stints in Seattle in project coordination and events management, she returned to Tokyo to work for prominent public relations agency Edelman, where her career in video games marketing properly kicked off. 

[[nid:464080]]

"The main difference between running marketing for gaming companies and non-gaming clients is… the passion and interest from the end consumer,” she laughs. 

"If you’re selling water or tissues or something, that can be challenging because you have to get really creative about finding an angle to get people interested. Whereas in gaming, people are already passionate about the product! They wanna know, they wanna talk to you, and it’s such a lovely thing to share the information they want.” 

Her Edelman gig in Tokyo in 2005 handing the Microsoft account wasn’t a cakewalk — how do you convince Japanese gamers to take a chance on Xbox in a market dominated by Sony and Nintendo? It had been a “hostile media environment” she described in her LinkedIn profile, but she manages. Monthly media coverage for Microsoft’s first console increased threefold, and she introduced social media strategies and developed a community outreach program, both standard concepts today but not too common back then. 

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cqjApY6rGI[/embed]

2007 saw Jennifer heading to Los Angeles to work for another long-established PR agency: Ogilvy. There she handled yet another major video game account — Square Enix — during the acclaimed studio’s turning point when it was handling more than just the Final Fantasy franchise. She helped push Final Fantasy XIII into North America, the game that revitalised the long-running series’ formula with a female protagonist and a refreshed combat mechanic. 

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H1UEHX_7X8[/embed]

Jennifer took a break from video game marketing and ended her run in Hill+Knowlton Strategies as Deputy Managing Director in Thailand. In 2016, she made her way to Singapore, where she took on the role of Senior Vice President of marketing in Asia for Bandai Namco. And it’s a huge account because not only does the company produce the beloved likes of Soulcalibur, Tekken, Ace Combat; it also publishes titles by Capcom and Square Enix in Asia. On top of a multitude of anime properties like Dragon Ball and Naruto. And of course, everyone’s favourite frustration simulator, Dark Souls. 

"We would just launch so many titles every year, and that experience gave me the ability to manage a large portfolio of games… which is basically the opposite of Riot,” she remarks. 

A riot of emotions

It was only in June 2019 that Jennifer joined Riot Games, which at that point in time, was only known for LOL. But after the studio’s 10th birthday bash, that all has changed now. 

"The reason I was brought on board is that it’s changing from a single-game company into a multi-game portfolio company. So that’s where my experience comes in, where I know how to manage a large number of timelines and different games,” she says. 

Jennifer’s vast experience across Asia makes her an obvious hire for Riot Games, but things could have been different prior to 2018. 

[embed]https://twitter.com/Kotaku/status/1027614781233090561[/embed]

In a stomach-churning exposé by Kotaku last year, Riot Games was revealed to have been steeped in a highly sexist corporate culture, where female employees were inappropriately harassed and often overlooked in employment opportunities for various sexist reasons, including not being “gamer enough”. 

"Many of those sources (Kotaku spoke to) painted a picture of Riot as a place where women are treated unfairly, where the company’s culture puts female employees at a disadvantage,” wrote Kotaku's Cecilia D’Anastasio. According to her report, women would be overlooked for leadership roles, and even if they were promoted, would then be replaced by men. D*** pics from bosses or colleagues were apparently sent, and there was even a circulating list made by senior leaders cataloguing the employees they’d sleep with. 

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLAi_cmly6Q[/embed]

Since the exposé, Riot Games has been scrambling to fix a toxic workplace culture, going so far as to employ the company’s first chief diversity officer. The company has since acknowledged the issue and apologised, promising change. In August this year, the company agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit lodged by a former employee for gender-based discrimination, sexual harassment, and unequal pay. In a follow-up report by Kotaku in the same month, employees assured that Riot Games have since made real progress. 

Still, the exposé gave Jennifer some pause and concern before considering to join the billion-dollar company. As it should.

“When I started going for interviews, the first thing I did was talk to as many women at Riot as possible, and any of my interviewers who were women,” she recalls. “I told them ‘You know, if this is still the case, there’s no way I’m going to put up with it. I’m out’.”

[[nid:414220]]

To her relief, the people she spoke to were “extremely sincere” and recognised that there needed to be a change, acknowledging that immediate action had to be done. 

"They were all very open and transparent about it, accepting of the fact that there's been an error in the culture for a long time and that there's been this concerted effort to change it,” she says, adding that the response she got had been very reassuring. 

"Since being at Riot, I find it genuinely amazing. I mean I don't know how it really was before but I feel like it's such a wonderful, accepting environment where everyone feels comfortable.”

According to her, things have really changed for the better at Riot. Corporate values have improved, recruitment and evaluation processes have been revised, and crucially, Jennifer has seen none of the infamous fratboy culture. 

Riot across Asia

It is, of course, an exciting time to be part of an age where millions of dollars can be won just for being good at video games. Esports is a behemoth that can’t be ignored any longer— even by the Singapore government. Especially so in Southeast Asia, the fastest-growing market for gaming. 

[[nid:460540]]

With the region holding some of the most active social media users in the world and a preference for mobile gaming, Riot Games is working to be at the centre of it all by self-publishing directly all of its new non-LOL properties in Asia. Singapore-based digital services company Garena still has its hooks in LOL and will continue running its servers for Southeast Asia. 

Jennifer will no doubt have quite a bit of fun engaging fans old and new when Riot unfurls its plans over the next couple of years. It’s a different world from how it was 15 years ago, back when she was lodged in a particularly male-dominated industry in Japan. 

"I was recently in an all-female meeting at Riot, purely by chance as we each happened to be the persons-in-charge of certain topics,” she muses. “We all remarked on how much things have changed through the years.” 

"I believe part of it is that companies are putting a greater effort into diversifying their workforce as they recognise the value in having a variety of perspectives. Differences make a culture stronger and companies more competitive, especially when our player base is so diverse and employees need to be able to relate to the customers they serve.”

ilyas@asiaone.com