Riot has over 1,000 employees. Valve at least as of 2013 had around 330 employees. Take that into perspective for a moment. Riot's problem isn't the employee number by far. It's pretty obvious that inner workings (i.e. employee philosophy and lack of concrete goals/direction) has a lot to do with it. But they'll keep sending the PhD in Psychology out to talk to us about how Riot is so big and full of passionate people who somehow can't manage to get anything done in an efficient time period that other competing companies have already done with far less people.
I keep seeing this argument and it's spurious because:
A)People here fail to understand how many moving parts exist in a typical studio and how those parts need to integrate with one another. One task requires multiple teams to deal with it.
B)What those moving parts do in the studio depend largely on the size of the playerbase and the game's current engine state. Dota 2 does not have League's player base nor League's legacy engine and client on which many development and infrastructure decisions are no doubt based upon.
and most importantly:
C) You have to understand that Valve is a unique beast in this industry. It possesses a flat architecture in which people independently work and they have no basic management structure.
Yet flat architectures have their own pitfalls, even at Valve. Sitting there and saying "well Valve is obviously doing something right with less people, Riot should do what they do" is like saying an apple should take on the characteristics of an orange. Imagine implementing Valve's flat architecture at a company of 1000 rather than 300. How much of a nightmare do you think that would be?
Valve can build features into Dota faster because they likely possess a ground-up built engine that can more easily support these features. The fact that they have less people means they are more agile about decision making because, well, it's a lot easier to make decisions with less people and less players.
There's also CCU to take into account. Dota 2 does about 900k concurrent players. League dwarfs that number completely with a concurrent playerbase of 7.5 million. You guys do realize that when you have higher concurrent players that your infrastructure, engine, and stability take a beating and that you have to grow them out, right? And that in this instance, the higher your playerbase the more important uptime is, yes? Think about how difficult it is to have to develop a client and and engine with features for 67 million players as opposed to a fraction of that amount with Dota 2. The sheer scale of League is one that no company, not even Valve, is dealing with.
If I remember correctly, Dota 2 was released in 2013. League has been around since 2009. Dota 2 and Valve have had the fortunate situation of coming after League and having less players. Less players, less load on a client, less spaghetti code to unravel, and less growth to deal with means, guess what, it's a lot easier to get things done.
The issue League faces is that it is an outlier dealing with enormous growth and having to adapt to that enormous growth. Hiring more resources helps this process but as you hire more people you need to grow your company structure, operations, ability to accomplish tasks, and get things done. This is something I believe is still in progress with Riot. They're a victim of their own success on that level and they do deserves criticism, but I keep feeling like the argument about comparison to Valve is made from a place that doesn't understand how studios work and how Valve makes their nuts and bolts work as opposed to other companies (outsourcing comes to mind).
The argument that "Valve does it better with less" is less powerful when you understand the full context of what that means.