Riot Games Promotes John Needham to President of Publishing & Esports

Riot promotes John Needham to expanded role launches animation and live action division.

Riot Games announced Wednesday afternoon that it has made a number of leadership role adjustments at the company. As part of this change, the League of Legends and Valorant developer also announced that it is establishing dedicated animation and live-action studios to lead future television and film projects beyond its hit animated show Arcane.

First, current Esports President John Needham has been promoted to a new role with deeper responsibilities—president of publishing & esports. His new duties will include overseeing a combined group that includes publishing, esports, international, platform technology, and music, according to a release.

Riot’s new television and film development efforts will be run by Christian Linke—in charge of animation properties and Brian Wright—in charge of “live-action. Linke will “build on the success of Arcane in collaboration with Fortiche Production” as the new head of the animation studio, while Wright will “lead the development of new live-action projects” as the head of Riot’s live-action studio. Wright is a former Netflix exec, who served as head of family and young adult programming at the streaming platform.

In the announcement, Riot CEO Dylan Jadeja said that the company has been making adjustments to the organization and structure to better serve players and fans:

“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.”

Riot said in its announcement that its esports and publishing teams will create new integrated experiences” that put various efforts under one leadership umbrella–esports, music, and creative publishing efforts.

More details about the changes can be found in this Riot blog post.