NEW YORK – Tencent Holdings’ Riot Games plans to lay off 530 employees, with management saying in a memo that the video game maker has too many projects and too little focus.

The cuts, which amount to about 11 per cent of staff, were announced on Jan 22 in a blog post and letter to employees.

“This isn’t to appease shareholders or to hit a quarterly earnings number – it’s a necessity,” the League Of Legends maker said in the post, acknowledging that it has “more than doubled in headcount” over the last several years.

Chief executive officer Dylan Jadeja said in a memo that Riot Games has made “a number of big bets across the company”, including new games. But some of those projects have diverted resources. For its first 14 years, the company primarily operated League Of Legends, still one of the most popular video games of all time.

“Today, we’re a company without a sharp enough focus and, simply put, we have too many things under way,” Mr Jadeja said.

Riot Games, based in Los Angeles, will reduce the size of its Legends Of Runeterra team, acknowledging that the game has not performed as well as hoped.

New development work from Riot Forge, an internal game development subsidiary, will end after the February release of Bandle Tale: A League Of Legends Story.

“Forge was an experiment to see what would happen when Rioters partnered with their favourite (independent developers),” the blog post read. “We’re proud of what we’ve done together to bring these stories to life, but it’s time to refocus our efforts on the ambitious projects under way internally at Riot.”

Other companies in the video game industry have been cutting jobs in recent weeks, including Unity Software and Amazon.com’s Twitch.

Riot is offering affected employees a minimum of six months’ salary, a cash bonus, career support and “even a personal computer if they do not possess one”. BLOOMBERG