Pros
I am updating my review of Riot and specifically the Hong Kong Studio since there has been a new direction earlier this year. I have worked at Riot since 2009 and joined the Hong Kong team in 2014. The Hong Kong office was initially focused on China publishing, e-sports and merchandising. Most of these functions have moved to Shanghai and the Hong Kong office pivoted into a development studio since early this year. We are around 25-ish now, half of the team are engineers. I am just updating new pros and new cons ———Building a studio from scratch ——— I love building stuff, teams, projects, etc.. If you also consider yourself more of an entrepreneur, helping building the studio in Hong Kong will be a blast. You don’t join a mold nor a machinery you need to adapt to, you build and craft it with your colleagues. ——— Big impact projects ——— Even though the studio is new, we are working on stuff that have pretty big impact and reach over a 100m players. The two bigger projects right now in the Hong Kong studio: we have two teams working on our new platform client (billions of hours are spent in it every month), and one team working on our personalisation efforts (skins). ——— Small team size ——— It is cool to know everybody in the office. When I visit the LA studio these days, I don’t know most people I run into. Here in HK office, I know everybody, that’s pretty cool. ——— Multi Cultural office ——— We have people from all over the world: US, China, Taiwan, UK, Australia, etc… we even have two french guys :-) ——— Hong Kong as a place to Live - Pros ——— The great thing about living in Hong Kong; convenient and practical city, easy commute, easy travel in Asia, affordable cost of living (food, entertainment, travel), great healthcare, top international schools, great for expats, low taxes, etc…
Cons
——— Still a lot of muscles to build ——— While we are a very strong engineering team, other disciplines are just starting to be built. We only have a couple of artists, still no QA department, etc… This means heavy reliance on external vendors and a lot of time on recruiting and building teams. If you are a leader who hope to have a team ready for you to execute, this is not your place. Riot will expect you to come and build your team. ——— International Recruiting ——— Most of our recruiting is international (meaning out of Hong Kong). That’s cool for the diversity, but that makes the team building and recruiting efforts more difficult and cumbersome (time zone difference, jet lag, etc….) ——— Becoming multi studio organisation ——— While some other companies are expert at managing projects from multiple studios, this is really new for us at Riot. We don’t have all the great systems, process, relationships in place yet and our studio is kind of the first to try, especially at that distance. Again, great if you have entrepreneur mindset and like setting things up, but you will be disappointed if you just want to get directions and hit the road running at full speed day one. ——— Hong Kong as a place to Live - Cons ——— Now, the least exciting things about Hong Kong: Some stuff are crazy expensive (real estate, imported goods, international schools), pretty hot and humid most of the year, pollution can be bad (but much more manageable than mainland china)