Back in 2020, it was revealed on Twitter that Riot Games was working on an MMO set in League of Legends’ Runeterra universe.
Five years later, and no details, not even a screenshot, have been released.
That’s why it’s always a big moment when anybody from the company acknowledges that the ambitious project still exists. This time, it was the turn of Riot Games co-founder, Marc Merrill.
The MMO was mentioned very briefly by Merrill during a speech at the D.I.C.E Summit last month.
While no new details were announced, League of Legends’ lore expert and content creator Necrit was able to contextualise the 30-minute speech to demonstrate how Riot is now approaching future projects. Especially after closing down its Riot Forge branch.
Forge saw Riot approach successful indie game developers and tasked them with creating new games using LoL’s characters and stories.
And what Merrill surprisingly revealed was that, rather than making these games to give back to the LoL community, as Arcane did, the actual goal was to use these games to attract new players to LoL.
That is not what happened. As Nercrit points out, there was no reason for players who know nothing about LoL to be excited about playing through one of the game’s stories.
Apparently, Riot knew this was an issue, but the size of the company meant it was too slow to make any adjustments.
Merrill claims that Riot Games hired too many people and that loss of focus was what led to the mass layoffs last year:
“We were essentially positioning the company as Disneyland. How amazing it is to work there, how great it is for them. Rather than how hard it is , and how critical it is, that we constantly strive to make things better for our audience.
“We lost sight of how much effort, and how much deliberate effort, it takes to keep the company focused on players. Which led to lower performance and then, ultimately, Riot’s first big round of layoffs ever back in 2024.”
Now, Merrill wants Riot to refocus on making games that serve the community and are made by people from that community.
He believes Riot are “finding ways to add value to the (fighting game community) or even perhaps to the MMO community.”
The latter is an especially difficult task considering how many games have tried and failed to dethrone World of Warcraft.
However, Merrill told Game File’s Stephen Totilo that those ambitious challenges are exactly what a company like Riot is set up to take on.
But Merrill insists that they’ll also look to serve the LoL community, saying: “With the League IP, we’ve been investing so much for so long, over time, sort of growing this world and adding dimensions. People want to run around the world of Runeterra. And so we want to help them do that, in ways that are worth it and meaningful to them.”
At the end of Merrill’s speech, he stressed Riot wants: “to earn the opportunity to serve (the League of Legends) community for a long time to come.”
It may be a very long time if fans commit to waiting for the MMO to finally release.
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In my seven years of esports writing, I’ve introuduced esports coverage to newspapers, interviewed some of the biggest names in the industry, and driven viewers mad with the puns in my YouTube scripts. I’m most proud of the latter.
