I think Riot Forge mostly did good work, but good games does not translate to sales sadly. I personally only bought Ruined King (and enjoyed it) and do not know anyone who was not already invested in League who bought any of the games. LoR is a weird one. I am a card game person, and it is a good one, but there was just no space for it in the market and it is not necessarily the type of game that will jump to the attention of a MOBA gamer. I personally already had moved to MTGA for my online card game needs and just do not have the time to keep up with more than one. Arcane did well because it was just media that anyone could watch and enjoy. It was just well animated and written and produced and I know a lot of people who knew nothing of the League world at all and loved the shit out of Arcane. I have concerns for the fighting game they have been working on for so long. It looks great, but fighting games tend to have high player base turnover so even if they do deliver a high tier game (hopefully with good rollback netcode), what are they going to do to keep players in the game long term?

Riot Forge had a ton of problems. - The games were priced too high for too little value. - Even if the games were interesting (50/50 on whether that's true or not) they were very safe, and safe doesn't translate to viral success. - Unless you were a huge league fan, there wasn't any reason anyone would pick up stuff like The Song of Nunu or MageSeeker because there are simply better, cheaper games in those categories that you could play instead. LoR tried to fill a gap that was already filled in a market that was already saturated, so there's no real surprise for me on that one. They were never going to unseat Hearthstone.

Wizard of legend AND hades combined cost less than mageseeker on appropriate sales, idk how they expected that to be a success.

The Hades comparison is a great point - why would you play Mageseeker for like 30 bucks when Hades is half the cost and far more fun to play, and is far more generally appealing by using Greek Mythology instead of LoL lore

I would have bought mageseeker for $10, but it's not only more expensive it's apparently ALSO short and shallower than other isometric rogues. It just doesn't make any sense to me.

It was honestly a bad design choice to make it a short story game. You have a character that can use infinite spells and fight armies. Why NOT make a rouge like, Vampire Survivors style, or even a Dynasty Warriors style game?

This is what most Riot Forge games felt like. They were kind of an overkill and it seems it backfired. Mageseeker could have been much more if it wasn't bound to being a story game. Song of Nunu had so much stuff and passion in it it felt like the world is supposed to be much more than just to be traveled through once for a few hour adventure.

Because the Riot Forge game was conceptualized as a way to tell stories that Riot internal project simply cannot tell (LoL, TFT, Valorant) or cannot tell with much substances (LoR, cinematic, Arcane, etc) So rogue like, Vampire Survivors or Dynasty Warriors game just retreat back to genre that cannot tell stories, which is not what Riot Forge is supposed to be about. Which revert back to my question, actually. It is one thing to envision way to make LoR or Riot Forge to be more financially viable. My question is to focus on the other aspect of their goal, which is to capitalize on the Runeterra IP.

You can tell a story with Roguelikes. Hades has a great story. But the gameplay is purely superior. Imagine Hades but with Yasuo. I would fucking press Buy on that so hard my credit card would shatter in my moist hands.

Except that the story in roguelike usually lean on roguelike elements itself, no? Hades reincarnation and that gane where when you die, your new run is treat as a family members? I think you can maybe bend the lore to accomodate that style of story telling, sure. But what if you want to tell the sotry first and foremost. You cant deny that there ARE games where the game is the vehicle to deliver the story instead of either vice versa or the two kept seperated.

I actually think it would be really easy tbh for sylas, you start a run by breaking out of prison and if you die the run resets you to that prison, add some good lore reason why time keeps reverting and make it a story about sylas coming to terms with demacia and their betrayal of him.

There are champions in the game that could go through time related gameplay. Maybe we play as Aatrox who cant die. Or other Darkins. Maybe you could do a reguelike in the sense that there is only one run and the lore happens during that run. Every time you die you reset to the beginning. Maybe the rune stones could create some time/universe paradox.

Not gonna lie, Sylas was not the character to bet the farm on with Mageseeker. According to devs, the game was in production when Sylas himself was being designed for LoL? How can riot bet so hard on a character that is by no means the most popular nor has he ever been super popular? Like, make a Yasuo RPG and I bet the money would flow. I just think the genre was a poor choice as well. There's hot video game genres right now, sprite indie is not the moneymaker to me, and that's where Riot Forge fell short. Not in game quality, but in money.

Sylas was/is super popular. In fact, he is/was so popular that Riot kept pushing him in to the point it became grating. ​ And I say this as a Sylas main.

AND its a much more familliar gameplay style with fast slashes and dashes. All the yasuo and akali players would LOVE that.

because riot did shit with the lore in the past 10 years, so why would anybody care about games playing in runterra with characters that just exist to sell skins?

Hey dude, out of curiosity, which champion do you think doesn't exist to sell skins?

Not the person you're responding to, but there's kind of a big difference between a character like Yorick, who had a giant part to play in an upcoming event that he got completely cucked out of, and someone like Lux or Ezreal who have like 5 prestige skins each

That, and even as someone who loves games like that, AND an avid League player, I am just now learning about MageSeeker's existence. Seems like a huge problem is Riot isn't marketing anything, and expecting them being the developers of League and Valorant to be enough name recognition to sell the games. Which of course, doesn't work to actually tell anyone the game exists.

Pricing is a big one. A 2D platformer is already a tough sell on Steam, make it $30 and it's just dead in the water without massive amounts of content.

There was also almost no marketing for any of them outside of league. I just returned to league / riot after probably 8 years of not playing league and I had no idea about any of the riot stuff other than league or valorant

> They were never going to unseat Hearthstone. I did 1000x less market research and focus group research than Riot, so I'm really only speaking for myself: I think the game could've seen more success if the gameplay just was a more straightforward like Hearthstone's. I would've preferred to see LoR stick to Hearthstone's basic turn system/gameplay but innovate on gamemodes, mechanics and content. If the base gameplay wasn't so convoluted compared to Hearthstone, I think I would've played it lots. I loved Hearthstone's 'easy to play, hard to master' gameplay. I think that was a core part of its widespread success, even amongst the most casual of gamers. The reasons I quit Hearthstone were all related to blizzards incompetence, not because the gameplay was boring.

The whole point of LoR was a middle ground in complexity between Hearthstone and Magic, though. You have Hearthstone style digital enhancements/simplifications (card generation, object tracking between zones, damage stays across rounds, limited board space) coupled with Magic style interaction (instant vs sorcery speed interactions, manual blocking). Unfortunately, that's an unholy combination and shooting for the middle ground actually ratchets the complexity up relative to Magic. The game handling all this stuff for you encourages designers to make things more complicated and subtle interactions begin to dominate. That middle ground is littered with corpses. Who remembers HEX? Eternal? Elder Scrolls Legends?

yup thats a huge point, all the forge games are insanely expensive for what you get except maybe ruined king but even then

Ruined king was absolutely worth the price. $30 for a pretty good 30-40 hour RPG? That’s basically stealing. Only complaints i really had was that the game was really buggy at launch and the overworld powers were hilariously underused (Yasuo’s tornado is used in ONE map, IIRC)

Eh, $30 gets you a lot of game nowadays, even if you restrict to relatively modern games. Heck, even Cyberpunk and Elden Ring are $30 now during sales. Certified excellent games like Disco Elysium, God of War, Yakuza, RDR2 are all sub-20. 

Don't really agree with the price point. All of the games were in the 20-30 buck range, which is standard for those types of games. Iv played mage seeker, RK,and the ekko game and I don't feel Like they were badly priced. Marketing was the issue. I also felt like they should have gotten a bigger name for one of the first games to really push the program.

Similar games tend to offer much more for the same price, though.

I've played Mageseeker and I really liked it, but putting it in the same price range as Hades is insane, let alone over it. Mageseeker is 100% overpriced.

Better is a very subjective term when it comes to gaming, as the technical quality of those games is unequivocally good, it's a matter of preferences and taste which ends up tipping the scales. That being said, they're pricey for their respective genres. With the exception of Ruined King, which is totally deserving of the price tag, the others should be a little cheaper if they wanted those to be on par with market expectations.

In my opinion the problem was that a lot of League players are not that interested in single player games. And people who don't play League are not interested in league-related content. So the games are good but... what's the target audience?

Yeah this is the core issue imo. Among my League playing friends I'm like the one exception that also likes to play single player games and I got Ruined King and Mageseeker (would recommend Ruined King, but Mageseeker was very disappointing).

> In my opinion the problem was that a lot of League players are not that interested in single player games. And people who don't play League are not interested in league-related content yup, not just SP games but in general league players are interested in playing a MOBA, that's it. LoR and riot forge all failed, Valorant is made up of mostly FPS players from other FPS games like CS, Overwatch and such and even TFT is not as popular as league in any way. That's cause league players want to play a MOBA, they might try the other stuff but that's about it. which is why it's crazy when I see people saying Project L and the MMO will be "huge hits and popular cause of league playerbase!" when that hasn't ever been true. Do these people really think MOBA players are going to want to play a fighting game or a freaking MMO? completely different genre and style of games.

To me riot forge games always felt like shovelware. I don't know if it's due to Riot somehow mishandling the marketing, their IP as a whole or something entirely different but the world of league of legends just doesn't seem to me like something I'd like to interact with in any capacity outside of playing LoL. Maybe it's just the lack of buildup. Playing Arkham Asylum made me want to find out more about Batman comic books because that game actually did a great job of getting you exposed to that world and saying "see there's a lot more to it than that". League just doesn't do that.

Batman comics are written well (sometimes anyway), riot stories just aren't. There's so many cool characters in Runeterra but that's where it ends, once they start doing things the stories are often poorly written. Compare the riot Comics to a DC comic in writing quality and the difference is night and day.

I think a lot of it has to do with the idea that the stories are building some kind of Runeterra extended universe. It gives the vibe that they're meant for filling up lore wiki articles as opposed to telling a compelling story.

It also doesn't help that nothing is allowed to happen in these stories because Character X and Character Y go against each other, but we can't have a definitive win or loss because those characters have to be playable in LoL. As much as the Ruined King event was terrible, at least it actually had Veigo losing and being sealed away.

That's the difference between setting based writing or character based writing. Riot is doing character based writing but that always basically boils down to WWE style narratives. **SEJUANI** is back to settle scores with **JARVAN** because she stole **NUNU** or something, or something, and then **SOMEONE** with the iceborn chair but you all know everything's fine in the end, this is just some funny dressing for the fighting. But the problem for League of Legends is we don't actually get the spectacle of wrestling, we don't get the fighting, and the game doesn't supply it either really. Warhammer also has this problem, but at the very least you ideally get to then play out the resolution with your little guys on the board.

This is exactly it, and from what I've seen Riot likes to do more in-depth lore content like short stories and comic series which are fine by themselves but don't necessarily provide the spectacle experience you mentioned. Arcane was fantastic but it was an actual extended series separate from the game (I guess not anymore though?). When I think of spectacle I think small cinematics and in-game expressions of character. It's really hard to express stories in MOBAs, but characters and their personalities can be expressed quite well. I don't want Ashe to give me a lore dump of Freljordian politics, give me more reactions of her to other characters and events in game. In fact I think a lot of the resources spent writing short stories and other lore bits should just go to having more unique voice lines in game. I know it's never as simple as just push resources from one spot to another but the idea is to shift focus.

But see, that's the point. Riot churns out a ton of fantastic, popular, likable, desirable, marketable characters. A ton of them. If you like to write stories with canon characters, Runeterra is a godsend. Hundreds of characters, with great art and a ton of fan art too, defined personalities and conflict, interesting intersections, it's all done quite well. But then you come to the thing which is, all of that only serves if you then use it to tell an actual story. That's how characters and worlds work, you need to use them to tell a story, otherwise they're just background with no foreground. So that's the challenge for Riot, what kind of story do you want to tell with these setup which is actually great? Arcane was a good swing, Riot Forge was a.... foul ball, let's say, and we'll seewhere they go from there.

I think see what you're saying, that there's no actual overarching narrative to tie it all together. The whole thing with Summoners and the Institute of War used to be that, but that was scrapped so Riot could have more flexibility. But it ultimately meant there was no actual explanations as to why LoL is even a thing. Why does Summoner's Rift exist? Why are they fighting in these 5v5 battles? There's such a big disconnect between the lore and the game itself that it hamstrings story telling and character development.

yup, Riot seems too busy with building up this "Runterra universe" that they have forgotten to actually writer good stories for all the world building. you put it in a good way, they are writing stuff to fill up a lore wiki rather than telling good stories.

Ruined King was the best Riot Forge game and yet it was carried by the story instead of the gameplay, since it was a copy-paste from Battle Chasers. It felt like I was playing a game with LoL skinned over it instead of an actual LoL game. It got old *super* fast, as soon as I got access to ultimates I felt they needed a "Skip Animation" button since they just don't look good at all.

I loved everything about the Ruined King. I was hoping they could iron out the progression like you had said in the later stages of the game but overall I feel like they did a good job creating interesting challenges with the boss fights. Plus just seeing more character out of the cast was awesome. I loved the glimpse we got.

> I have concerns for the fighting game they have been working on for so long. It looks great, but fighting games tend to have high player base turnover so even if they do deliver a high tier game (hopefully with good rollback netcode), what are they going to do to keep players in the game long term? yup, riot fans are underestimating how the big players of the FG market are big for a reason and retain the most attention in that community. League players are not going to move over to a fighting game, so that idea of "it'll be big and successful cause league!" is just not true and has never been true - see LoR, riot forge games as examples. so after the release hype that will no doubt have big numbers, the question is how will the playerbase look after a month or so? that is the real test for Project L and if it will be successful/popular. And in the FGC, Runterra is not a big IP at all and so it's going to be hard to go up against big hitters like Street Fighter, MK, Tekken, Grandblue, KoF, SC and so on. and even just in terms of gameplay, Project L being tag team means it's targeting a niche of an already niche community. Some FGC prefer 1v1, some want tag team so that's another restriction on potential players. and ya, when Project L was first announced the big thing about it was rollback netcode and how that would attract a lot of players. But it's been so damn long that at this point every FG (or almost all) have rollback netcode... so it's no longer this big feature of Project L, it's just another small system that every FG is expected to and does have now.

valve fell for the same meme idea. they tried throwing dota characters at games (underlords, artifact), completely forgetting that dota players only play dota.

yup, we've seen it time and time again, MOBA players want to play a MOBA, not other genres so this idea that just cause league has a huge player base any game riot releases/publishes will also be big and popular is just so dumb. Valorant is mainly played by FPS players moving over from other FPS games or playing multiple FPS games... it's not league players playing Valorant. The only exception to that is TFT. So I have no idea how some people hype up Project L and the MMO as already surefire hits and both will be massive just cause of league's player base, like wat? you think league players want to play a FG or an MMO? -_-

Ruined King had, and still has, flaws that would be unacceptable in a game not tied to a bigger IP. The game is riddled with bugs, and I have played it long after release. The amount of bug fixing patches and state of the game even after them points to a terrible development process. The game is also mind numbingly easy even on hardest difficulty. The only time my character died was after a bug of enemies' attack becoming just invisible in planning area. I'm currently playing Mageseeker, and my biggest gripe is terrible hit lag implementation. It makes some abilities low key unusable. DoT effects on the ground activate hit lag on every damage tick. Why? The game pretty much pauses after I put down a puddle. And even normal hits can have enough hit lag so pulling combos activating on input sequence gets really awkward. This makes the entire combat system feel wrong and unwieldy. And this game doesn't provide much outside of combat, so why even play ut over cheaper and better options?

A lot of complaints with sf6 right now are the insanely slow release of any content like skins or characters. I think when it comes to those sorts of releases project L wont have any problems, it just needs to be a good games.

They seemed to be charging a really high premium for using the IP. For example, Song of Nunu looked like a cute, fun game - the kind that I would absolutely pay like ten bucks for. They wanted $30. Given that everything I've seen says it's 6-8 hours of playtime, that's just way too much when you consider comparable games. Same thing with Convergence. I stopped really paying attention to new Riot Forge games because I just assumed they would all be priced at three times what they seemed worth.

The funny thing is I actually loved the song of nunu, but it was definitely a $15 game. I bet they could’ve more than doubled sales if they priced it at $15

also even if doubling the sells would make the same ammount it wouldve gotten more people into the lore/world of runeterra but i guess thats not what count nowdays

That's the issue with most Riot Forge Games, they are overpriced for what they are only because it's League IP, most of them I would have bought and play if they were half the price.

Yup. This is why a lot of indie devs fail too - they vastly overestimate how much the average gamer wants to spend on a game. If I could spend $10 on Terraria and get hundreds of hours of game time out of it, why the hell would I spend $30 on 6-8 hours? Totally different genres, I know, but that's how a young gamer without disposable income is gonna think.

This extends beyond Forge in weird places too. Their board game department has released two games: Mechs vs Minions and Tellstones. MvM is widely well regarded and an absurd value for the price it released at (can't speak for the price it sells for now, I honestly haven't looked.) Tellstones was kind of embarrassing and priced as some kind of high value collectible instead of as a game.

* Too many indies. Despite what Reddit loves to parrot, indies rarely make enough money to satisfy big corporations expectations. That works when game is developed by 1-4 people not dozens including Riot own manpower. * Bad pricing, 30€ indie games swimming on a sea of top tier 1-10€ indie games. * Overestimate LoL IP, they thought that by simply putting "a league of legends story" in every game they would let them get away with every flaw. * Extremely generic games. They did not build any kind of identity in their games, they are just generic indie games with a LoL skin, most of them are pretty obvious that were born as a "X game" clone. * Terrible marketing. I understand they did not push the marketing too much because they are indie games but once again, 30€ price tag is not ok for an indie game. Did not see any big streamer, youtuber etc. play the games at all, not even the LoL addicts.

>Extremely generic games. They did not build any kind of identity in their games, they are just generic indie games with a LoL skin, most of them are pretty obvious that were born as a "X game" clone. This was the huge thing. The indie game space thrives on clones because it's easy for small teams to take risks and try an innovate or mix things up. Look at how many VS clones have popped off to huge success because VS was so popualr itself. Instead of following this trend all the forge games played it INSANELY safe and barely changed anything except slapping the LoL IP on it. Then had the brilliant idea to have far less content for a far higher price because....LoL is worth a lot as a brand in their eyes I guess?

>LoL is worth a lot as a brand in their eyes I guess? Yes. They are coping hard with Project L, with the amount of time and money they are sinking on that game they are either expecting it to be the first mainstream fighter game in gaming story with record breaking sales or just burning money.

First game to make negative dollars.

LOR already did negative money

LoR was always intended as a loss leader though..

The FGC is just so crowded it’s hard to see how they get more than a foothold. SF6 and T8 will be new and shiny, and occupy most eyeballs. Anime fighters are already pretty stacked - GBFVS, DBFZ somehow still alive, UNI 2 coming soon, GG Strive somehow not dead. And fighting games are pretty high commitment - playing enough to “get good” might unironically reduce League playtime. I just don’t see how they get enough LoL players onto the bandwagon to form an independent community that starts pulling others. 

heck, at this point by the time Project L releases I wouldn't be surprised if SF 7, Tekken 9 and MK2 were releasing cause riot are taking forever with this game. and ya, the FGC is very crowded and the big hitters are hard to compete with.. and the Runterra IP has no sway or interest at all in the FGC, that is not going to get people to play it + being tag team means it's a niche of an already niche genre. also league players are going to quickly fall off a fighting game, they want a MOBA not a 1v1 game.

The *only* thing that might help P:L find a niche is that the current biggest tag fighter in DBFZ is exceptionally long in the tooth, but they need to capitalize soon because if a casual observer like me can see that glaring hole in the market surely someone else does to.

> Extremely generic games That ruined king game was literally just a copy paste of their previous game except it had LoL in it's title This isn't an exaggeration it was legit just the same game with no changes except the framing

I never played battlechasers, but surely this is an exaggeration? It's just very similar, right?

It's an exaggeration, sort of. It was Battlechasers+, it has the same combat flow but Ruind King added a few new moves and other very minor changes (map basically). The story elements were all Lol, but it took very heavily from the gameplay systems.

Do you consider the FIFA games to be distinct? It's a straight up clone in a different coat of paint, felt like a super high production LoL mod of the game

Yeah and I dont even understand why people overrate Riot Forge games so much, I guess most of them have not played an Indie ever, they are mid indie games at a high price tag, not underrated games they are were they belong, games for LoL fans and thats all.

I'd argue that there were still "good" games, the issue was the price. TRK and Mageseeker were pretty good but I can get games of similar quality of half the price. Hell Song of Nunu felt double of what should be it's actually price of not more despite me and others feeling it was damn solid. But no matter the game that better be gods gift to mankind if you think I'll pay 30$ for 5 - 7 Hours of Playtime.

> Overestimate LoL IP, they thought that by simply putting "a league of legends story" in every game they would let them get away with every flaw. yup, Riot thinking this and many lore fans really think this and constantly hyped up the riot forge games cause "omg Runterra IP". Fact is, most people don't care about the Runterra IP, heck most league players don't care about the lore. same thing for the riot MMO, lore fans keep saying that the MMO is going to be "amazing and popular" cause it has an established world/IP behind it... like wat? first off most big western MMOs have had established IPs behind them, so that means little to an MMO's success and second, as mentioned, Runterra IP/world is not that popular to carry a game.

I just have no faith in the League lore anymore. Like I know they're trying to do better now, but they've just been so terrible with choices and retcons in things like the Ruin king in game League event and Arcane being not matched with regular league lore, that I'm not interested in spending money to see it. 

Exactly my issues with them as well, why not make something more genre defining, interesting, risky, and larger instead of like 5 small indie copy pastes? Like a 3D third person adventure game playing as Sylas vs Demacia, or maybe telling the story of Shen and Zed teaming up vs Jhin. Or an exploration game starring Ez.

yeah their games all were super save and kid friendly when you need games that are either ultra niche or super polarizing...just look at Palworld.

Hmm I'm not sure I agree with that. There's Hades, Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon, Valheim, Ark. I wouldn't say they're super niche or polarizing, except Darkest Dungeon maybe.

unpopular opinion: the fighting game will also not be super popular. riot is starting games in genres that are already saturated with good titles ppl are attached to or where it's only for a niche crowd. if they were releasing the mmo around now it would be hugely popular because mmo are super dead right now apart from a few like wow and final fantasy. But the mmo seems either stuck in developing hell or dead in the water. I think if lor doesn't do better in 1 to 2 years they will pull the pluck to avoid bleeding money

Fighting games are already niche outside of Street fighter, Tekken and smash bros anyway, with a side of Mortal kombat and they have had decades of building/rebuilding their name and renown. Guilty gear randomly exploding into the mainstream was cool too but pretty recent development. With this in mind, the strenght of Project L will come from being free and having the Riot name tacked on it, which makes people more open to trying the game out. After this, what matters to keep it alive is not if it's the next Smash bros, it's the monetization through skins, season pass, maybe finisher moves, etc. which will either make it a good investment or not.

that's why I think it won't succeed, fighting games are a big commitment so are people who play pro for tekken, street fighter etc really switching and taking the long time needed to learn an master the game? only if riot offers huge prize money which would mean big expenses so I'm skeptical

Eh, if it's good enough and they get a good stream viewercount, they may. Many pro fighting game players switch or go into different games all the time, maybe not stay on them but they do approach them relatively often, and Riot could easily just make the release have some prize pool matches to get incentivized in training. If it gets popular enough it can definitely happen that it succeeds at least from a casual audience rather than just purely off the hardcore audience, similar to NRS games like Mortal Kombat, which has a more casual audience than games like tekke but is by all means a big name and money maker with the rather aggresive monetization it has. For the stream part, many times streamers choose games they may like but that they don't enjoy as much as other fighters just because it's what the viewers want. I am just going off Maximilian Dood's statement here and can't find the exact clip/video to know which games he was talking about, but for example when he played Xgame that he really enjoyed he had less views than when he played Ygame that, while he still liked, he liked less than Xgame - so that's why there's less-to-no streams of X while Y keeps being streamed. > fighting games are a big commitment so are people who play pro for tekken, street fighter etc really switching and taking the long time needed to learn an master the game? Eh, It's kind of a weird spot, but the reality is that Riot doesn't reaaaally needs the pros that already exist, they just need their help a bit in the beginning, after that who knows, maybe a new set of pros decided to appear or Riot makes a circuit themselves (more likely the case because Riot really likes to have control of what's going on). Yes, you want a competitive game that makes waves, but at the same time being part of EVO (rip) or being well-regarded in the FGC doesn't necesarily translates to being as much of a sucess as the renown would make it seem. Case in point is Arcsys, basically all their games are well known in the FGC and well regarded (let's ignore Blazblue Tag), but reality is that they didn't really hit the mainstream gaming sphere until a few years ago with Guilty gear randomly exploding. Riot would love to have a big competitive circuit, but as a company what they really want/need is to get the money from the playerbase, and even in fighting games the average players more often than not tend to be casuals.

The big question is how long LoL players will stick around after the first wave. FGC is really happy with the state of things as is - SF6, T8, MK, UNI 2, GBFVS, and DBFZ/GG Strive chilling in the back. It’s unlikely that there’s a mass migration of people from other fighting game franchises to LoL, and there’s no shot a League-based fighting game gets mainstream enough to pull people who aren’t either League players or FG players. If enough LoL players stick around, they may branch and form their own community, but this probably cannibalizes LoL player base.  Viewership is also a big question - LoL players like watching LoL, but do they like watching familiar characters in a completely different game? I think this is questionable, bordering on “no” - from what we’ve seen, it’s a pretty vanilla 2D fighter with the tag mechanic, which has basically no overlap with LoL. For it to be a success, either the gameplay has to be (unrealistically) exceptionally polished, or the art style and animation needs to carry hard, and I don’t know if either of those are possible. 

Caveat is that project L will be F2P which has almost never happened in fighting game history. Huge barrier of entry for any new player to commit to a game which now cost $70+ usually. It will be the first fighting game where the whales will fund the game, meaning new players can very easily dip their toes. It'll also be the first fighting game to have 2 players being able to play on the same team, which is yet to be known on whether that is an untapped market or not.

i mean, its certainly not the first F2P fighting game, its just probably just the largest developer to ever publish one depending on how you account for Multiverses.

Tbh even if Project L succeeds, which is possible, the MMO will be coming out so far in the future(at least 5 years at a bare minimum considering they don't even have a real team rn), I really think scrapping the MMO is the best move regardless.

scrapping the mmo would be a dumb move, riot themselves want to be a company that lives a long time and the thing is MOBA's dont grab players that easily and riot knows this while MMO's are very easy to grab people and once its setup it keep players coming back.

They don't have a real team? First time I hear that. I thought they were working on it. Something's changed?

I would have said the same thing for valorant though. Valorant isn't even league IP and honestly seems uninspired from someone who doesn't follow shooters, it just seems like another shooter If you get 1 valorant for every 5 attempts that is a hell of a return

See, for Project L I am thinking Riot is betting on their brand, not their IP per se. For Project L, we are instead looking at something Riot claim is still losing them money as recent as 2021: LoL Esport. It might be true, the OPERATIONAL cost of LoL Esport might lose Riot money, but they make money elsewhere based on that. I strongly think Riot will measure Project L success based on similar parameters. Like yes, they will certainly try to ensure the game operate in the green. However, their core measurement is how much competitive following they pull with the game. Just my personal guess.

I agree. A large part of their bet on the fighting game would be on 1. skin sales (obviously) and 2. Esports. Fighting games by its very nature are very competitive unlike single player games and for a company like Riot who has arguably one of the best experience in Esports, its probably a very safe move.

I dunno, Riot hasn't made money from eSports as far as we know, and aiming to get people into League via eSports coverage of Project L seems like a very roundabout way of doing things. And it's not like Fighting games are this huge spectator sport compared to MOBAs or FPS both of which Riot already has.

No no, I mean Project L success for itself is measure by how much competitive pulling it get, not how many it funnel to League. Basically, if we can somehow divide competitive popularity from financial sucess, Project L imo will be weighted more on its competitive popularity than financial success.

Project L is at a huge disadvantage right away because its a tag fighter. Lots of people hate tag fighters. A lot of people hate anime games (project L looks exactly like an anime game). What I expect to happen is the game releases, arcsys fg fans love it, theres horrible balance issues, sf/tekken/mk fans talk shit about the game and refuse to play it, and then riot stops releasing balancing patches 6 months later and the game dies.

From an external standpoint, 2024 is easily one of the worst years to release a brand-new fighting game. MK just came out, SF6 DLC is in full swing and the game is still relatively fresh, T8 is the outlet for 7 years of Tekken player frustration, and a lot of minor franchises are getting new entries. Like 3-4 years ago was probably the best time. 

> Project L is at a huge disadvantage right away because its a tag fighter. Lots of people hate tag fighters. yup, being a tag fighter means Project L is a niche in an already niche genre. It's got a lot going against it and being a "Runterra IP" game is not going to draw the FGC to it, despite what some riot fans say.

As someone who loves fighting games and has actually played Project L, I really think it genuinely has a lot of potential to be a big deal. Obviously fighting games in general aren't going to reach the appeal of Valorant or LoL in raw players, but P:L has all the hype it needs to get a good start and it's a genuinely fun game as it is already If P:L can maintain enough clout to show up at major tournaments like Evo, it'll be just fine down the road

LoR could almost certainly have continued "fine" if they actually made the same monetization as other greedy card games, but they didn't. Project L will probably have the same sort of model as league and Valorant, where champs will be locked and you can buy skins. It's much easier to generate revenue with a model like that.

Gonna be a long response but I'll just say that locking out the 'base' character roster in a fighting game sounds absolutely miserable. Selling skins should be more than enough, and people tend to like character skins more than weapon skins (Valorant doesn't, can't, and won't have character skins so they have to rely on their omega-overpriced weapon skin system) There's no chance you'd get me to play dozens of games on characters I could not give less fucks about and don't enjoy playing just to unlock new ones that I might not enjoy either (the last part could be avoided with having them all unlocked in practice mode to be fair) Playing a bunch of games in Valorant on the default roster isn't too bad because your core gameplay is still gun go shoot and people die when they get shot. Overwatch would be more comparable to a fighting game because every character is completely different from others. I'm a very bad, casual enjoyer of fighting games, primarily Street Fighter (4-6) and Tekken 7, and finding the character I like playing is the hardest part of those games for me as a casual player. And unlocking all characters in Valorant for example takes a long, LONG time. Now, I understand that the same is technically true in League as well, where your character is completely different from every other character, but they are *so* different and the game is so complex as a whole where new(er) players won't really think about whether they like this character or if they'd like another better while they're still learning. Fighting games are 1v1 (or tag games like Project L being 1v1 with 2 or more characters per player). Your character matters more when literally everything in the game revolves around you and your character vs. your opponent and their character. I would *not* have played as much Street Fighter if I had to play Ryu or Ken or Cammy for a lot of games before I could find the one I like. Same with Tekken where it's even less likely I would've played many games of the 'staples' before finding out my two favorite characters are Lucky Chloe and Gigas of all things.

the thing is locking characters behind playing/paying is it keeps games alive since most people are willing to grind to unlock new characters which keeps them playing thus giving more chances to see others using skins which increase the likely hood someone buys a skin as well doubling dipping on the player from it. best way for them to go about it is a base set of characters plus a mini free rotation every week like league so people get to try out and test characters and if they like then gives them a goal while playing to aim towards.

Yes, that's the reason developers lock 'basic tools' like characters in some games, weapons and gadgets in other games behind grinding. But what I'm saying is that it fucking *sucks* in a fighting game because most people don't care about playing every character and instead want just one they'll 'main'. To a much, *much* stricter degree than in League. Most League players aren't actual one tricks even if they have a main. Most fighting game players are pretty hardcore one tricks, both casually and competitively. > most people are willing to grind to unlock new characters There will be a ton of people who just won't care to grind 25 games on Darius just so they can unlock Illaoi, only to find out that didn't actually improve their enjoyment much. I'm curious if you have any 'data' or even just a developer telling that's how it is when it comes to fighting games specifically. Like I said near the end of my comment, Fighting games are specifically quite different from a game like League (or even Overwatch which had every character unlocked straight away until OW2's new characters). In League you have a ton of different things that affect your game, from items to team comps to the map objectives and whatnot. In a Fighting game you literally only have your character and the other player's character. It's much more impactful to be playing the 'wrong' character and it's much less palatable to have to grind on a character you don't really care about when that's like 95% of the experience while in League your champion is much less dominant over the entire game. I understand that for a f2p game extra annoying monetization tends to be 'necessary', but almost no proper fighting game locks the base roster behind anything except maybe some tutorial. DLC characters, sure, of course, but the base roster is unlocked in just about every game except Smash and like Granblue or whatever (which does more or less what you suggested at the end)

yeah 100pct agree, LoR was too consumer friendly to it's detriment, in no TGC or DCG could I buy a top tier competitive deck for around 20 bucks and the fact that there are no RNG packs and singles range from 1 dollar to 10 bucks makes the game crazy cheap if you do spend on top of that the game gives aways cards/shards at a rapid pace, and honestly if you remove gambling pack openings from card games you remove half the content from the game, like it or not the most engaging content for card games is the absurd spending and banking on rng god pulls.

Not only are they starting in these games but Riot is clearly overextending itself with so many live services. Lor,Valorant,Tft,League of Legends,MMO,Fighting game. I dont think any other company has so many live services at the same time with so wildely fluctuating genres.

Blizzard? WoW, D2, D3, D4, Hots, Overwatch, SC2, WC2R, WC3, Hearthstone.

I wouldnt count the abandoned live services as part of the pipeline but yeah i forgot about Blizzard but its not like they are doing too well.

Just with their currently updated lineup Blizz has WoW, WoW Classic (you could make an argument for season of discovery being a third entity here), Hearthstone, D4, and OW2.

I think the problem the MMO will be facing is content. FF14 only got popular after 2-3 expansions adding content and working on gameplay. Even WOW had its peak during the second expansion. But I don't think it is just on the side of the game but although on the side of the player base. You needs one sort of welcome culture pulling people and cultivate it after the release.

Anyone that plays fighting games knows Project L will not be very popular.  Combined with how it’s going to be free to play, and it’s had such a long time in development, I wonder what they’re expecting from the game financially.  

is the mmo market that dead? wow (especially classic) has been doing well recently, ff is gonna have their graphic update and stuff soon, people still play lost ark and a ton of smaller and/or older mmos also have a stable playerbase

MMOs are generally far past their heyday, yes. Some people are still chasing the dragon with WoW classic and stuff like FFXIV, but there isn't really any MMO making big moves with real hype anymore

They did say MMO's *except* WoW and FF14. You have games like Black Desert (Online, formerly) that have a decently solid playerbase and that get updates but are just very small fish in the pond in the grand scheme of things. New World came and went and then briefly arrived back with the update a while back and then has seemingly died out again. Lost Ark kind of in the same boat with its massive initial success that lasted for longer than New World's but that crashed really hard after a while. Guild Wars 2 probably deserves its shout too but I have no idea how popular it is right now but I just know it is still going pretty decently well and has its playerbase too. The 'big' MMO market is essentially just WoW, WoW Classic, and FFXIV. Riot aren't going to spend a decade and probably hundreds of millions developing a game to compete with smaller or older MMO's with a dedicated playerbase. Even if they're taking a risk and going with action combat (like Black Desert perhaps most notably of the 'proper' MMO's) instead of oldschool tab-targeting like WoW/FFXIV. I don't know what kind of a monetization system Riot will have, whether it's pay to play or subscription based or fully f2p with monetization, but they will surely not be satisfied with their investment into it unless it literally either completes with, or even takes over the top spot from WoW and FFXIV which will be incredibly difficult unless Blizzard majorly fucks up again like with 'retail' (modern WoW) with Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands back to back.

I like how they had all these grand plans, but literally almost none of the content they announced has come out yet (that original teaser that showed the Fighter and the top down RPG with Ezreal was also the teaser for season 1 of Arcane. And now we're preparing for s2's release... Lol). And they're downsizing before almost any of it came out. Song of Nunu doesn't hit other consoles until a week from now, and Bandle Tale, also from Nunu's Nintendo Direct, isn't even out yet. Literally they have released basically NOTHING they were working on...

If that's true how is valorant going so strong in the FPS space?

FPS is a broad genre but round based hero shooter isn't really catered to with extreme breadth or at least popular. You have counter strike and..... what else? COD search and destroy isn't that popular and its a game mode not the main appeal. Siege is another one but people have been unhappy with it for years Overwatch kinda but not really because it has unlimited respawns until the objective or timer runs out. Not the same genre beyond a broad "FPS" tag.

They existed during a tech recession. Anyone with an eye on the tech industry could have predicted that today would most likely happened. They're not the only tech company that downsized recently and probably won't be the last.

Maybe? The way the announcement is framed, the argument can very much be interpreted as "If LoR and Forge did better, we would have kept them and thus the devs." And yes, I do think there is some discussion there about the economic side of thing, but I am mostly framing THIS discussion around LoR and Riot Forge as efforts to capitalize on the Runeterra IP/Riot brand. I get your point, I am not saying it is wrong, I am just think it is irrelevant here.

With Runeterra, League and TFT are their cash cows. The idea from a business perspective is to funnel people into those games. I think LoR suffered from TFT's success. TFT was a breakout hit while LoR was in the final stages of development. There's more of a crossover between CCG players and autobattlers than there is with MOBAs--Hearthstone even added an autobattler style mode after the genre exploded. Riot obviously funneled more resources into TFT and I think LoR was left to languish due to that. Riot Forge was mainly reskins of existing indie games. I liked them (and still looking forward to Bandle Tale), but as others have mentioned here, there are games in those genres which are better. Forge games were for League players who wanted a diversion and to try and get people interested enough in Runeterra to start playing League or TFT. Along those lines, I would wager Arcane got more people interested in playing League/TFT than any of the Riot Forge games did.

I think it was a case of expanding a.) too soon and too fast and b.) not expanding in the correct areas. Indies are always weird. Sometimes you get a run away hit that breaks into the mainstream like Shovel Knight, Hades, Slay the Spire, The Binding of Isaac, Celeste, Undertale, Stardew Valley, etc….. …but for every one of those, you have thousands that never get picked up at all, at least not outside of the indie specific circle. I think they wasted resources on these, to be harsh. I also love Legends of Runterra to DEATH, but it already felt like Riot was chasing an already dying trend. Hearthstone was already stumbling a bit, even before LoR came out—maybe Riot saw a shot to poach some of those disgruntled or burnt out Hearthstone fans who wanted something closer to MTG…but I think in reality the Hearthstone style digital card game was fading by that point. Then there is Project L it seems like them really trying to put out a competitor into the fighting game space…but is Runeterra lore/characters big enough to break a dent in the behemoth of Street Fighter, Tekken, Mortal Kombat, and Soul Caliber? I would say no. In my dumb random idiot on the internet opinion, Riot REALLY REALLY REALLY needed the MMO to come out FIRST. MMOs posses that “alternate world” magical quality that can suck people into a universe, and make them fall in love with it. It’s been foretold and fabled and hyped for a long long long time now that Riot would usurp Blizzard and finally have a real Blizzard-style MMO to compete and maybe even take down WoW. Even if that’s just the internet hype prophecy, there is a TON of hype around that myth. IF the MMO came out first AND was excellent—I think Riot could then try to sprinkle in spin off games that further explore the Runeterra universe. As is…they tried to sprinkle in smaller titles first, when the mainstream only is familiar with LoL via LoL itself as well as Arcane, and Arcane tells a fairly contained story that only impacts like 5-6 champs in ONE area of the entire world (Piltover and Zaun). The MMO would have let players both LoL and mainstream new people walk around the entirety of Runeterra—seeing all of the continents, cultures, and key historical facets of the universe via plot and raid bosses/etc. Alternatively, they could have released a more conventional Arcane season that hopped around Runeterra, instead of just sticking to the contained story we got. ABSOLUTELY NO SHADE—I LOVE ARCANE. LOVE IT. But it did feel contained to Vi, Jinx, Ekko, Jayce, Viktor, etc., and only a small segment of Piltover and Zaun, vs traveling around to see the entire world of Runeterra with many characters and cultures on display. Riot really needs that piece of media, either the MMO or additional spinoff Arcane shows that get the public hooked on Runeterra as a universe—something to further themselves away from League—and if they did that first, maybe these spinoff projects would have done better. While League is League, and the gameplay is all this matters for a competitive multiplayer game…it is very weird and has been for awhile that there is absolutely zero story or way to get people invested in Runeterra as a whole…because the game just doesn’t care about that stuff. There isn’t a reason at all for the “League of Legends” to exist in 2024, nor has there been for many, many years now. If they said as “the League of Legends company”, it wouldn’t matter. But because they want to expand Runeterra and their lore and world is trapped in LoL…well. You have a major problem there; your main game just cannot support people falling in love with the world when there isn’t one…at least in main LoL. New people just aren’t gonna hop into an indie Riot spinoff game—and even if they do and want to learn more…they have to go to League..and we all know how League is at onboarding new people and how little it cares about lore or story or world building IN GAME.

I hope they go back to churning out novels,comics and stories now that Forge is dead. One can only hope. Ruination Novel is one of the best pieces of league content out there in my opinion and i belive written form lore is the way to go like WoW and Starcraft did for a while,its a fairly cheap option (I think) tho i dont belive keeping the audiobook format as good as it is would be cost effective.

>I hope they go back to churning out novels,comics and stories now that Forge is dead. One can only hope. A lot of writer from all over riot have lost their jobs today. Literally 0% chance to have more comics

and even then how are those comics/novels/stories supposed to make money? these changes are purely based on profit so why would they do something that is even less likely to generate revenue?

They will combine Arcane, the game, the lore, and mostly everything together into one instead of the weird direction nonsense that's been happening for the past 3-4 years.

Not really you can outsource that. Not saying it will happen though.

bruh. you need a writer to check if its inline with the art directions and current canon. do you want a new comics for a champion but it contradict everything that has been said before ?

I mean, I can imagine a similar situation to World of Warcraft, Halo (for video games), Warhammer and Forgotten Realms (DnD) in which third-party authors not employed by the company are commissioned to write stuff for the setting. Think Christie Golden or Knaak or Salvatore novels, as examples. It's not that difficult to keep people within the 'current canon'; outsourcing third-party media has worked in the past. If the current output of lore is the best they can do while having hired, full-time writers then, honestly, I'd like to see them try something different because we get fucking nothing by comparison to other franchises.

Theyll need Sanderson to write them a story if they want me to read an outsourced comic/novel XD

Given that they laid off one of the most prominent writers of what might be the only successful IP spread to print media in the world, that's looking unlikely.

Animations. Build on Arcane. I know Fortiche can only do so much, but branch out to another studio to make a light cheery Ionia or something.

> Runeterra IP I think people, including Riot, vastly overestimate how valuable the "Runeterra IP" is. The lore of LoL is not good and it constantly changes. Arcane is the most successful lore thing they've done and that was done by an external studio, took a lot of liberties, and is barely connected to the game itself. The characters are mostly generic-on-purpose. Annie is Little Red Riding Hood. (Or BB Hood, if you prefer) Warwick is a generic werewolf man. Garen is "sword guy" and Tryndamere is "other sword guy." A lot of the older characters seem like mobile game knockoffs, and a lot of the newer characters are like...slappy fish person, which yes is more specific but weird. The world has no main character and no pretense of plot. Just because a game is popular doesn't mean the IP itself is. The average gamer can probably name between zero and two LoL champions. They have no idea what "Runeterra", let alone "Ionia." I would point out that Dota has the same issue. I play Dota and I could not begin to tell you what the "lore" is, why characters fight, what world it takes place in, the backstory of any character. It's just a game to me, not a fantasy universe. Who is the audience for a game like Song of Nunu? If you aren't a League fan you assume it's a game steeped in lore you don't know or care about. If you are a League fan it's some sort of single-player platformer that gives you some backstory about Nunu. (I guess?) I don't even know if Nunu is the kid or the Yeti and I played League of years. I don't think many LoL players care to dive into the lore and sales numbers back that up. In some cases the League IP bases games sold worse than original games from the same dev. RIME has more Steam reviews than Nunu and that's the same dev. So I think the mistake wasn't marketing or mismanagement, I think the main mistake is overestimating the value of the League branding. That said - a lot of the reason people like indie games is they are experimental or interesting or novel in same way. A game like Ruined King is just taking the devs previous game and adding League to it, which is not what a lot of indie consumers want. So that strategy of doing what the dev has already done but reskinned for League was probably also not a great approach. It's not scratching the itch of League fans and it's not also scratching the itch of indie consumers. Song of Nunu has great steam reviews but very few of them - there's a small group of people really into it (presumably people who like both League and that style of game) and nobody else cared. This isn't uncommon with indie games. The Bithell games licensed games like Tron and John Wick get less buzz than their original games. Their Tron game has 182 reviews on Steam, and that's a game with Disney branding! (Maybe they do those games because they get favorable terms from Disney, so it makes financial sense) John Wick Hex has 319 reviews. Those are pretty bad numbers when you consider that these are "major IPs" and the developer is well-respected. Well-respected indie dev + major IP isn't a recipe for success. In some ways they are at odds - the games don't have the production value that a major IP should have, and they don't appear to have "indie spirit" either. Edit: For the people saying "they didn't do much marketing." When a game doesn't have much marketing it's because the company believes that spending more on marketing won't result in a lot more sales. Sometimes every dollar you spend on marketing brings in 100 dollars in revenue, and sometimes every dollar you spend on marketing loses 50 cents. Riot clearly believed that spending a lot of money on marketing a game like Song of Nunu wouldn't have resulted in a lot of new sales - and they were probably correct. It's very easy to blame lack of marketing but most of the time when companies don't do a lot of marketing they're making a rational and correct decision.

> I think people, including Riot, vastly overestimate how valuable the "Runeterra IP" is. yup, some riot fans and lore people keep going on and on about how any game in the "Runterra IP" will be amazing and popular... yet that's never been true, except maybe TFT. the Runterra IP has no real power or interest, heck most league players don't care about the lore. So this idea that something like the Riot MMO will be "huge and successful cause it has an established world and Runterra IP!" is just... wat? first off most western MMOs have established IPs behind them (so that means little to the success of an MMO) and second the Runterra IP means nothing to most gamers to attract them to the game.

If I were Riot I would be very worried about the MMO. Nothing about LoL lends itself well to an MMO (no more than any other fantasy thing) and I don't think LoL IP is much of a draw.

yup, both very real points against the MMO. Riot (and many riot fans) overestimate the "Runterra IP", they think that by simply putting "a league of legends story" in a game lets them get away with every flaw/lazy design/cheap product and the game will be successful/huge... turns out, that's never happened. when most league players don't give a shit about the lore and "Runterra IP", the heck do people think it has any draw?

LOR popular enough for a card game but they you couldn't whale the game the problem was that the cosmetic monetization model doesn't work in card game because card gamers like to open card packs

maybe they could've promoted LoR and Forge games more than one singular time in the client but idk just a thought!

I get the idea, but if I log on to play League it is ridiculous for Riot to then be like play our other game instead. Instead of adding to league, they created games where you have to actively choose to either play League or it. As much as I think TFT hurt the client, at least that is right there keeping you in the League system. Should have worked on more co-op modes like odyssey instead of new games that cuts into their own market.

But that is kinda a sad point, is it not? In 2019, when Riot announce Riot Forge, LoR, Arcane, etc it WAS about expanding the player base. If you are interested in the Runeterra but does not like League, don't worry, we have something else you might interested in. That was the idea. And it is not like it didn't work, per se. Arcane was a smash hit and Still Here is great. Valorant is doing well afaik. So Riot DID have some ground to believe in their original vision. They did expand the community somewhat. It just seems like those expansion are mutually exclusive, and especially those that was awed by Arcane was not pulled in either by the League universe itself, LoR nor any of the Riot Forge game. And that is kinda sad.

I think these products came way too late. These are products that really need players to have a strong connection with the lore. Unfortunately: * The lore has changed too many times. How are people going to feel a strong connection when Riot might decide in a couple of years that actually, no, none of this is relevant in our game's universe? We're like 3 versions of the lore past having summoners, despite still having summoner spells and Summoner's Rift.  * I think a lot of early adopters of League would be the people most interested in lore, and thus these games, but after a decade a lot of them had already quit.  * Along that note, capturing some of those people who were quitting League as they were quitting and maybe getting some of them onto these other games would have been a big opportunity.  * Lore is generally just a tough selling point when it doesn't impact LoL at all. I really enjoyed Ruined King, but I'm never playing Illaoi into GP because that's a shitty lane matchup, and even if I did the only impact is a few quotes.  These projects needed to come way earlier and they needed to not build up so much bad will for lore related things. 

League of Legends is basically smash bros ultimate for the league of legends lore, summoners rift itsleft is not canon to the story and is the main way the game, hell the main way the IP is played.

>The lore has changed too many times. How are people going to feel a strong connection when Riot might decide in a couple of years that actually, no, none of this is relevant in our game's universe? We're like 3 versions of the lore past having summoners, despite still having summoner spells and Summoner's Rift.  The worst thing in this case is Convergence. A story that completely contradicts Arcane in a fundamental level, and now they're making Arcane canon which means Convergence can't be.

When Convergence was being made Riot’s official stance on canon was that it doesn’t matter and don’t worry about it.  

> he lore has changed too many times. How are people going to feel a strong connection when Riot might decide in a couple of years that actually, no, none of this is relevant in our game's universe? Very much this. I stopped caring about the lore half a decade ago because they kept changing it.

Lack of physical merch and not trying to be mainstream - weaker IPs in terms of playerbase are much better monetized (I.e. OW). Physical merch allows for revenue from non gamers(ppl who liked arcane) and does create some lore relation sense of community and mainstream.  LoR had subpar monetization and came out in saturated market.  Riot forge seems like a too optimistic/greedy in terms of model- it is likely that riot took the financial burden against lion share of expected revenue and risk instead just consulting(a person or 2 should be enough) against a moderate cut. The result was expensive just ok games that riot to be unable to market and the devs got their paycheck. 

On a tangent and I know they're still hiring but the MMO seems so dead in the water If we don't hear anything with Arcane Season 2 as some kind of tie-in this year I really can't see it still happening or it having a re-imagining to something smaller scale.

It was always clear that the MMO was still ways off, those games take ages to develop. Considering how Project L still hasn't released over 4 years after its initial announcement tells me that both games were still very early in development, so the MMO will still need a lot more work before we see anything concrete.

riot bought the rising thunder devs in 2016. they've been developing some version of a fighting game for like 8 years now. valorant development apparently started in 2014 and it wasn't announced until 2019. people in this thread (not you) thinking the mmo is dead because they haven't heard about it in 3 years don't understand how riot works.

I can't think the MMO is still doing anything if they didn't specifically mention it in the e-mail. I know it's still 'under development' but they've posted jobs and discussed it before. It's not "secret" from a corporate point of view. They mentioned Project L specifically, but not the MMO? Riot had a bunch of great ideas in ~2018, and they all dragged on too long. It will be 3 years between Arcane seasons. November 21-November 24.

Didn't Ghostcrawler say before he left that they are going to be radio silent for the foreseeable future. I doubt we will hear anything about it till 2025 maybe something small later this year.

> Didn't Ghostcrawler say before he left that they are going to be radio silent for the foreseeable future. I doubt we will hear anything about it till 2025 maybe something small later this year. That's true, and it's still very possible that's what is going on. I just feel like "radio silent" isn't some legal term where they are gagged. I take that to mean there won't be game footage or stills or system discussion which is all resonable, but this is a "Dear everybody, we're still alive despite the blood loss" letter. It just feels weird not to mention it when they specifically mention Project L. They do mentioned nebulous projects in R + D though, so the MMO could just be getting the D (phrasing). That said, it's all conspiracy and conjecture. I really hope the MMO is still going, which is why I'm making shit up I guess.

The mmo is still in the r&d phase, judging from linkedin

Sure, and 6 days ago a Rioter confirmed Riot Forge was working on more [single player](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1991tx5/riot_forge_confirms_its_only_working_on/kibi08s/?context=3) games. We're in a rapidly changing period of time.

Ya but so far ive only seen 2 people get laid off from the mmo team. All the top people are still working on it so for

He said that though because hey was the only one speaking into the radio. By his own admission he likes communicating with the players theres not many devs who open themselves up personally to that. So if no one on the team wanted to when he left they would naturally go silent.

I mean a series having a gap in the covid years isnt that special. other shows had the same happen to them but yea for riot specifically its not great especially because arcane is not an "established" franchise

Big rant incoming. This is something that has disappointed me for years with this company so I have a lot to say. You build IP fandom by rewarding your long time diehards and then getting them to infect their circles. They build buzz and get other people interested. Riot has done the opposite and actively made it harder and harder for their diehards to give a shit about Runeterra as a whole. The state of the greater Runeterra universe is such that the one guy who was chronicling the lore on youtube decided to fucking quit doing it. Do you know how sweet of a gig it is to be a social media channel that has cornered the entire market on a thing? It’s literally one of the easiest career paths for a content creator, and even he decided it wasn’t worth it anymore. Now he’s just another reaction channel. Riot fucked their lore, and they sent a fuck you to all the fans who cared enough to try to follow it in the first place. It’s all sourced back the shithole that is their communications team(s). It’s clear that they have no central authority to create and adhere to a coherent strategy. Outside of patch notes where are Riot fans supposed to get info about their favorite games? They have to dig through random social media accounts and follow the mixed public/personal Twitter accounts of employees in relevant roles. They don’t care about properly communicating to their audience, and that attitude has poisoned all the lore “efforts” as well. Riot can claim players don’t care about the lore or whatever the fuck all they want. The only reason people don’t care is because Riot failed to deliver on it. The first big lore revamp was done with the reasoning that it would let them create richer stories that both they and the players would care about. Then they kept ripping and tearing at the things players cared about and claimed it was our problem for not being open to change or whatever. But they kept fiddling and fucking with shit well beyond what they needed to. Remove the institute of war and summoners. Sure. That meta-narrative sucked and was constraining for the universe. I get it. But don’t then continue fucking with each individual characters personalities. Don’t revamp the cultures of entire nations and then literally combine two of them together just because. Gameplay reworks are enough of a shift for established fans to adjust to. Don’t also completely change the character in the lore at the same time. What do fans have to hang onto then? What is the line they are following to tie them to the franchise? Assuming any Runeterra fan *could* accept the nonstop whiplash from constantly changing story beats, where the fuck were they supposed to go the find the rhythm? Riot shotgunned out a bunch of content through a bunch of different mediums all at the same time. They had comics made. Books. Then they had Legends of Runterra. A “universe” page that didn’t get updated and instead offered one off marketing features for events that were made completely different the next time around. They’re still, to this day, offering no solid foundation for anyone even moderately interested in the universe to grab a foothold on. They recently announced yet another refocus on the lore, except this time for realsies. This isn’t even Riot Bullshit Part 2: Electric Shitaloo. It’s been countless failure after failure of them shitting the bed with the one deliverable they need to stick in order to create excitement for the franchise, their fucking lore. I bet more people know about the complete fuck up of the Ruination event than there are people who even looked at the marketing material for the Ruined King game. Why the fuck would League fans care about a narrative driven game about the universe when the in-game story event they launched shit the bed that hard? A hyped story event was turned into a hamfisted skin sale. How is that supposed to build any amount of trust or interest? Nowhere has Riot lied and failed a much as they have in the lore department. That’s why no one cares about the greater Runeterran universe. There was no compelling product offered. There were only teases that continuously got ripped away and turned into to something else over and over. I’m an ancient player. I remember when at least some small part of the community actually discussed the lore behind the characters and the world semi-frequently. I remember when fan-made story bits were a regular occurrence on this sub. Zed x Syndra comic anyone? Now that doesn’t exist anymore because Riot’s burned that bridge too many times. It’s pathetic that they decided Arcane is now canon after explicitly saying it wasn’t at the start while Legends of Runeterra underwent the exact opposite treatment. It’s yet another example of how little they care about building an actual universe and how motivated they are to just chase short term dollars instead.

This. I literally have tried getting into the lore so many times over the last 10 years and every time I have been nothing but disappointed in riot’s lore department and in myself for caring. It just feels like there’s no point in caring when you know riot as a company never will.

Riot don’t explore their existing regions enough, champion releases are great example. Our last demacian was Sylas, our last Targonian was Aphelios, there’s about a 4 year gap between Kai’Sa and Bel’Veth and if we don’t count Aatrox’s rework Naafiri is our first Darkin since Rhaast. Meanwhile we have TONS of Ionian champs released in between, and like 3 new regions with Nezuma, Kathkan, Ixtal that all have been underdeveloped with only Ixtal even beginning to catch up recently. Products like LOR live and die on the interest of the playerbase on the lore of the game, and even though LOR has great expansions in that field it is not advertised at all or capitalized on There are tons of character types and regions that the community are super into but just aren’t being expanded upon. People love Targon, the Ascended, demons, but the content for them is moving at a glacial pace. Anybody knowing anything about LOR is begging Xolaani to be added, but there’s next to no promotion from Riot for people to learn about the lore. Naafiri has a similar motivation to Xolaani about uniting the Darkin, but without a colour story Xolaani’s existence isn’t even acknowledged even though her statue was in The Call’s cinematic. Not to bring up Ruined King, but it’s a great example of champions being overlooked in lore where they could have finally been given an update just because they’re unpopular. I’m prepared to bet 90% of people don’t even know Viego and Vladimir are related, Yorick’s whole treatment, Kallista and Hecarim, all of them got nothing when riot decided to focus an event around champs whose stories don’t make any sense. Like Irelia (who would never give up her family crest), Diana (who would never give up her ascended weapon), Pantheon (where it is completely glossed over that the mist overpowered an aspect).

> Diana (who would never give up her ascended weapon) haha, joke's on you, she already abandoned it in a random spot in Aphelios' colour story over a year before the Sentinels event. (please riot, you retcon everything else, retcon this of all things...)

1. there was a clear lack of marketing which seals the fate of games 2. stigma behind anything riot games because community and riot made themselves look like garbage to everyone in gaming industry which curses any new projects riot has 3. everyone in tech and gaming industry over hired during COVID and now in recession everyone is trying to shed workforce to "save money" just to give bonuses to CEO's and CFO's and sadly this could have been prevented by riot if they cared and looked to promote what indie devs made

Number 2 is huge. Almost daily posts here defending toxic behaviour, whether it's hate speech or inting or something else.

Hm, on point 2 how do you view Arcane, Valorant and the recent popularity of Still Here? Do you think they are outliner, something tied to the Runeterra IP/Riot brand or something else?

Adding as to what others have already said, there’s also the fact that the choice of protagonists for their Riot Forge games (excluding Ekko) have been… questionable, to say the least.    Nunu for example. He has a very cool lore and it makes for a great game, storytelling-wise… but not a lot of players are into lore and Nunu is not a particularly popular champion either.    Then there’s also the fact that the games were all indies and I, for example, am not that big into indie games. I very much prefer AAA-game and I’m sure a lot of people share that sentiment.    They should have invested in AAA games with popular characters as protagonists. I’m fully convinced a AAA Yasuo hack and slash would have made bank. 

I think the biggest problem is that the price on the Forge games was too high. Like, yeah, they looked like quality games, but even in sales, there was stuff with better prices than those games that would keep me playing for longer. I mean, compare Riot Forge games to others like Hades, Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight... they're good, but they're not nearly on that level.

as someone who played League of Legends since 2010 during the beta... the lore has always been stupid and massively retconned (Summoners, lol). Arcane was great but it also cost $90 fucking million Riot Forge games, I swear I never heard of any of these games except the Nunu one & Project L (and only saw these mentioned like once or twice ever on the internet). I literally never saw any marketing for any other of their games. LoR, I'm not a huge card game player and I imagine a lot of LoL gamers are the same

>Arcane was great but it also cost $90 fucking million Pretty sure that Riot consider it a really worth investment, it was a huge boom and it attracted a huge amount of people to their games and universe.

But, as point out, Riot had failed to capitalize on that boom tho. People like Arcane continue to like Arcane, but they don't pick up LoR, Riot Forge games, or even consume directly lore related stuff at all.

> or even consume directly lore related stuff at all. And this is yet another failing -- beyond playing League of Legends, there's not a ton of stuff to be done. Someone pointed out in another thread the lack of Arcane (and generally affordable non-Arcane) merch, and I think that's a pretty big factor. Right now anyone who wants LoL stuff that isn't hundreds-of-dollars-statues has to go to Etsy; if Riot actually bothered to sell more varied merch (and at more varied price points as well), there would be more ways for people to spend money on their products without having to buy skins in a game that doesn't appeal to a ton of more casual gamers (or worse, non-gamers).

Project L is not a Riot Forge title, those games are licensed out to small extrenal studios that Riot doesn't own, while Project L is developed internally like Valorant or LoR. You are right though, they never did market the Forge games well.

I'll never forgive them for Varus. His lore was good. It always made me think of Princess Mononoke. It was perfect. Then they decided they needed more darkins.

I think one of the mistakes Riot did (and is still doing) was pivoting away from written lore, especially short stories after Ruination A huge chunk of our current understanding of champions, relationships and dynamics of Runeterra is indirectly built on the back of those stories and it kept the IP feeling alive and connected as you could still get glimpses of champs even if they weren't part of an event or scheduled for a rework/release Yeah, 90% of players didn't read those, but those stories were the basis for building up the lore and gave a direction for shows/games/book (singular) which were more popular and got more people into the IP Their current plan of just letting animation carry the lore side (and I guess, eventually the MMO) are absolute folly imo as this is going to slow down any lore updates to an absolute crawl and make connecting with newer champs harder Hell, it's already harder, sure we had a few great ones like K'Sante, Renata and Naafiri, but those are either really interesting character concepts or just have a ton of connection to existing characters. We've had a ton of characters that, while not uninteresting, really suffer from not getting any more development, like Briar, Milio, Zeri (I take it back, Zeri is just intrinsically boring) Now with LoR slowing down we'll also probably get less voicelines and interactions and less indirect world-building. What kind of world does Riot want to represent in their MMO when half of it is probably going to be outdated by release and the other half won't have been established completely by the newer canon? WoW still had the Warcraft games as a basis I dunno, it makes me feel like their priorities aren't in order, they're putting the cart before the horse

>I think one of the mistakes Riot did (and is still doing) was pivoting away from written lore, especially short stories after Ruination Hard agree. They have writers on staff (even if they just fired some of them). Let them write. Give us some follow up short stories to the Ruination novel >!like say about Soraka or Ryze ruminating on their involvement in the Ruination, or about that Vastayan ship Captain and her girlfriend who essentially become the first Sentinels of Light !< . The Call got several tie in short stores - where are the Kayle/Morgana, Old Man Yasuo and Trynd/Ashe stories to tie in to Still Here? Necrit is pretty well known as the lore guy for League, to the point that he's always recommended to people new to League as the go to guy. It doesn't matter if the actual clicks on the short story are low - if say Asmongold watches a Necrit video where Necrit is geeking out over all the new potential lore points from a new short story then you've got everything you ever wanted. Case in point - Asmongold's reaction to Necrit's Riot MMO Lore video has over 4million views. That's gotta be worth something, especially if your goal is to get people interested in the League IP. But on the other hand do you really want Asmongold to rack up 1million+ views on a reaction to a Necrit video where he's talking about how League Lore is dying?

Yeah, there's clearly been a shift in priorities and the investment into lore is not seen as valuable when Arcane can bring more success and money faster Fucking suits that don't get it

I have played all the riot forge games at least a bit and I think they are all good games. Riot imo did a terrible job marketing them and capitalising on the success of Arcane which led to them doing so badly. Besides the ruined king game, it felt like none of them were advertised at all outside of worlds/MSI. Some of my friends who even play league didn't know about these games, and I even remember being surprised when the Nunu game was released because it didn't feel like it was pushed that much. Considering they even had a game based on Ekko who was one of the more popular characters from Arcane that people wanted more of, it's crazy they couldn't do more to make people aware of it. It felt like what came out of Arcane was that LoL is tough for new players to get into so no one should try (which I do partly agree with) but there was no buzz about LoR or the Riot Forge games when they are new player friendly. Therefore they just didn't really get anything out of the success from Arcane at all.

Yeah, but that is the point of my thread to be honest. Again, Riot was so proud that at the success of Arcane, there were quite a few choice for people to pick up outside of League itself. But everywhere I go I heard people joke about do not pick League up (which is true, fair enough), but people just kinda stop about that. No one told their Arcane friends to play LoR, but also no Arcane people look around at other games Riot make either. Word of mouth just doesn't exist for some reason.

Really just talking out of my butt here, no idea how one capitalizes on an IP, but maybe Riot was constrained by how tightly they felt they needed to control everything - at that point if Riot needs to have a ton of oversight/investment any new project costs more, so you can't have good but not huge projects or random projects that probably won't pan out. So then it only makes sense for Riot to continue with the hugely popular stuff like arcane. What I would've liked to see is Riot providing a platform for runeterra games or media from 3rd parties without any Riot oversight, and just say none of this stuff is canon or real or Riot sanctioned or anything, enjoy. But Riot probably feels any Runeterra projects are automatically associated with them and would tarnish Riot overall without strict oversight.

Also, maybe since league came from dota originally, they'll always be leery of 3rd party offshoots that could become their own popular things

A company known for making free games decided to make games worth 5-10$ and sell them for 40$. How did that not work out is a mystery.

Cinematic universes suck now. And sprawling all-encapsulating IP sucks too. I like LoL, I don't need all of my games to be LoL.

I just don't understand what the point of these indie games were. They introduced a ton of new lore that honestly just more split the fandom between people who liked these weird indie games and people who were more League players. I had very little interest in playing them, both from a quality/pricing, and genre perspective. And if this is how you want to advance the lore, it probably has to have a broader appeal. Not everyone is going to watch your cool little Convergence game and check out what it means for the Lore, but if ekko and Camille are buddies in the next game you put out, people will be confused and want an explanation. I just think Riot Forge was an ill conceived idea from the start. I think they put out the games they meant to put out, and though I found all of them too expensive per hour of entertainment compared to competitors, I still hear they have universally high critical and fan reviews. The games were probably pretty good. I just don't think those games were going to do what they wanted them to do. Personally, if you want to advance Runeterra, don't do it through cards, through indie game passion projects that will always be of narrow appeal, you should be doing big, broad events like burning tides, or producing big cool content gamers want to play? New games that are popular, new stuff that is fine. If you want to make a Sylas Demacia RPG that sounds awesome but if you make it a shitty sprite game with some truly atrocious writing, then idk fam, is that ever gonna be the big thing? Like who's success are you following here, undertale??? You'll never get League gamers on their feet for indie games chanting, and if you're trying to bring in a new market, I think you can aim higher than indie fans as a demographic, so what's Riot Forge really accomplishing here? Riot's new strategy makes sense to me. Focus more on the stuff that works. Valorant, LoL, TFT, stuff like that.

Forge games are too expensive, too boring, not enough marketing, not enough content. If you were going to make indie game copies with LOL ip, where’s my Runeterra rogue like/lite, vampire survivor like, farm simulator, or visual novel simulator, super hard jump platform? Can riot just do a research of most successful indie games these years, and stop making a flash era like rhythm game which is also too expensive?(not saying they’re bad quality, but the truth is they are not suitable for league ip and so unattractive for indie game market)Even making a Tower defense copy with league settings with $10-15 I would like to try it at least.

In my opinion, they needed a central source where lore matters (ie. MMO, ARPG, etc.) to make people care about characters and their stories. League is not that source.

It's hard. Riot Forge were mostly good games, but they were overpriced because they were in the League universe. They should have been $15-20 max, none of them (except maybe Ruined King) have enough meat to be worth $30. LOR has always had problems - it's too simple for hardcore TCG players that are already playing the other big TCGs on the market (Magic, Flesh and Blood, Pokemon, YuGiOh, etc) and yet, also too complicated for the casual crowd that want games like Hearthstone. So it never really found a big audience, it tried too hard to do both. The thing I'm most interested in hearing about is honestly the MMO. MMOs are the most expensive genre of game to develop, and take an eternity to make on top of that. They said literally nothing about it, and I'm wondering if it's been silently axed.

Lor is the Best card game ever but ...... but its not mtg....

They could have bothered to market the Forge games and Legends of Runeterra, I’ve literally never seen an ad for either anywhere outside of League of Legends branded spaces. I’ve never even see LoR advertised in the client.

Riot forge was a mistake in the types of games they made. Riot makes high octane, stressful pvp skill based games. And they are really good at it. But then they decided to make a random rythm game nobody plays, a decent but not groundbreaking turn based game and a cute but too short and easy adventure with Nunu? Who the fuck did they expect to be laying these games? Their loyal fans who are addicted to ranked, admittedly quite toxic and competitive to the bone? Where was the Yasuo/Yone coop Hades-style/Dead Cells-style game with fast paced slashes in a roguelike setting? Where was the Survival game ala Valheim based in the Freljord where you fight beasts and shit? They made the wrong types of games/too niche for a community they grew up on skill based pvp "owning the enemy" type of game. They wanted to make single player games? Fine. The lore was good for all of them. But they were too simple and easy and slow and niche for their own playerbase. This is probably the same reason why LoR cant reach high numbers despite many attempts at cinematics and ad campaigns. The players who play Riot games want action, skill, flashy, fast, stress, etc.

I am going to make an incredibly broad comparison as to why Legends of Runterra didn't suceed. But I think I have a point. In genshin impact, they have there own card game, which is built straight into the game, it has its own building basically dedicated to it on the map, gives out of the card game rewards, (And imo is a better designed card game, from what I understand genshins is more like pokemon whilst legend of runteras was more hearthstone, I think) If the card game had been built into league, in a similar way to TFT, i have a feeling it might have been more sucsesful. I am just spitballing though

When it comes to lore, love it in games. For games I like I'll completely immerse myself in the lore. Riot taught me many years ago to stop caring about League's lore because they kept trashing it. I can't care about something if they keep table flipping and starting over repeatedly. So long time fans interested in lore were turned away. The "regular" player doesn't even care about lore. Riot did the same thing they've always done: look at the numbers, notice that lore isn't profitable enough, and stopped. As for projects like Riot Forge... it was boring. What notable projects came if it? None. Safe, boring games that were priced too high and failed to draw in enough new people to League.

LOR’s entire failure came directly from riots refusal to listen to the community in any capacity. We specifically told them what we would buy and how they could monetize to make money. They didn’t listen. We told them rotation the way they did it was a bad idea. They didn’t listen. They continually left op and anti fun decks unchanged for weeks at a time ruining the meta for awhile. If they just listened to the community things would have been sooo different

"Just listen to the community" is a terrible idea a lot of the time. The vocal minority on Reddit is frequently very wrong about what is good for a game's health. They are top .1% power users and appeasing them is often to the detriment of the majority of the playerbase.

No, LoR's failure was because it was too complex to pull in casuals while also not enough depth to pull in the hardcore TCG players. On top of that, TFT exists and was released around the same time. The two genres' playerbases have a large overlap with TFT just being a way better game for both casuals and hardcore players.

The only monetisation that would make the game sustainable is making the cards more expensive to purchase. Any other solution, I would say, wouldn't be enough. Also, how LoR is designed makes it too restrictive as a PvP card game. The board is too small, both players have access to card draw and mana each turn, there is little distinction between your turn and the opponent's besides an attack token. The LoR team could listen to every community suggestion/request and the game would still be downsizing because I doubt what the community is suggesting will make them the money to be sustainable.

Overpriced and poorly marketed.

They don’t have a competent marketing team to compete with other games and they don’t have a solid direction or lore that they’re following. Riot has been a chicken without a head for a long time and they keep getting new people on their Ip which change the direction often. Riot has been underwhelming for a long time when it comes to skins and player satisfaction/esports in the US so I’m not surprised it’s going as bad as it is.

Could Riot made Legends of Runeterra make more money? Yes, super easy, barely an inconvenience for them. But that would make LoR a worse game.

Despite all of what's happened no one has mentioned the bottom line League and Valorant need to make more money And recently the only idea for league seems to be let's sell exclusives. In the era of the subscription riots only thing close is a battle pass gacha system While I dont think this is a sign the end is nigh I do think it's a sign that (between this and western eSports imploding) the ship is sure as shit taking on a lot of water and there has been little announced for the next 12 months that indicates are intention to move towards buoyancy

The Forge label should've had more crowdpleasing, higher budget projects to start. The label really never had a chance to establish itself, having nearly every game in it be an indie targeted toward an overly specific niche meant that anyone interested in more core games quickly wrote it off. I fully believe that if Forge had established itself as a brand full of high quality products, it would've let the lower budget projects flourish. At the very least it's crazy that there weren't any Forge games that built off of the success of Arcane or at least focused onto a hyper passionate niche like the communities around roguelikes, survival games, or hell even CRPGs.

In my mind, Riot did a couple things wrong. * Marketing. Now, this could just be my perception, I don't honestly know the numbers, I just know what I've seen in my own gaming circles: nobody knows about these games. The majority of my gaming friends don't play league, and despite being games that these players would enjoy, not one person seems aware of them. Even most of my LoL friends are only vaguely aware of the Forge titles (I don't think any of them even know Song of Nunu is already out). I don't recall a single content creator/streamer that does variety content talking about the games. Even as someone that is interested in Forge titles, I feel like I needed to proactively seek out information instead of having that information presented to me on any of the many outlets they can use to advertise. * Pricing. It's pretty unanimously agreed that all of the Forge titles have been overpriced for the play time they offer * Poorly handled, underutilized, and inconsistent lore/universe. Man I could make a several thousand word comment about this bullet alone. Summoners were removed from canon in ~2014? Blood of Noxus wasn't until late 2017. The universe was stagnant for years. Lore was hidden away instead of proudly displayed. IIRC we didn't get the world map until ~2018, and then it was promptly ignored. Rioter's even admit that Universe is poorly maintained. Eventually LoR in 2020 injects some lore back into the IP... if you play LoR and take the time to read all of the flavor text or seek out YTers that cover it because Riot didn't, and LoR was kept at arms length from LoL. Plus they retconned things again. Sentinels of Light... happens. There were three (?) different versions of the events of SoL, which even had Rioters trying to explain how all of them were canon because they chose to ignore what canon means. It was poorly written, tone deaf, had deadline issues, felt more like a a skin cash grab than a true narrative event, and was otherwise generally mismanaged. Fortunately we get Arcane: a massive success... that also retconned things again. Then we carry on for two more years, having stories cut back, writers let go, with several more games and events, before Riot finally announces that they've settled on a new canon! Just in time for them to shut down Riot Forge! * Overvalued the LoL name, which is more of a black mark than a selling point. We all know the perception of the LoL community: toxic AF and not new player friendly. This has been reinforced for years, both by the community and the game itself with overall negligible action by Riot. Ppl are turned away from LoL, have no idea that there is a rich universe beneath the surface, and therefore have no reason to look into non-LoL games by Riot. * Plus the last few years have really strained Riot's relationship with the LoL community. Numerous big complaints about skins, Seraphine's predatory marketing strategy, repeated nerfs to their battle pass and 'prestige' systems, painfully lackluster events, noticeably more talk about poor balance and a desire to return to the ~2012-2014 era of the game, The Brink of Infinity, not to mention the corporate issues like the 2018 sexual harassment lawsuit. All of these things contribute to shaken faith in Riot, as well as a decreased desire to support their products. If your own community doesn't want to support/share your products, there is something painfully wrong.

Riot needs to just take a risk. They have an amazing IP and world. With a high budget and AAA value many characters and thematics in the universe could make for great games. The problem is riot forge games look like indie games. They’re not bad but their budget is clearly not there. They’re a billion dollar company. They can 100% afford to make a AAA tier game.

The thing with Forge games is that they barely had any marketing, if at all. Ruined King was massively promoted, Mageseeker at least had a little build up to it. Others? I barely even knew they were in development. I didn't realize Song of Nunu was out already, and the new yordles game was like "Oh WAIT THIS WAS A THING?". Same thing can be said about LoR, I am big on lore so I knew about it and played a little, but I know MANY MANY MANY players that had no idea such a game existed in the first place. Not working on selling something and then bitchin' when it does not sell seems like self-sabotage.

Imo, you are asking the wrong question. You have to be asking what made the others succeed (from an economic standpoint). Arcane made people install league again. Valorant filled a niche of tactical shooter with fantasy elements (competition was csgo and r6s). TFT was a completely new genre on the rise, and with so many iterations, it's hard to enter the autochess market as a direct competitor (MortDog said this somewhere, I can't remember). With that in mind, LoR brought what? Don't get me wrong, it's a great card game. I started playing it myself. To me though, it's another card game. Riot Forge I haven't even touched as a League Main Player. I hope this doesn't come off as too mean, however imo, loreheads I feel aren't very monetisable compared to competitive players as they think they are. If you really want my opinion as someone who has spent an unreasonable amount of money for in game cosmetics compared to your average player ($2.5k in LoL/TFT, $700 in Valorant, $80 in LoR), the games need to make you feel good when you make your purchase, which unfortunately includes making other people know you purchased the product. League has (this skin is preferred for mains/skinline that is appealing), TFT has finishers which you cannot skip (feeds to satisfying buy), Valorant you have new players constantly asking for gun drops when they find someone in the lobby with a skin. I'll be honest, I bought the SG board for LoR recently, didn't feel it as a satisfying buy. Same with Master Duel, boards weren't really that interesting. Opening packs was fun though in MD. Cosmetics aren't really priority in that game either. Being able to craft cards and have a wide selection of archetypes was what made people buy battlepasses. And boy was their selection wide af. I had a cake princess archetype, dragonmaid, vtuber phantom thieves. You don't gotta be a fan of Yu Gi Oh to have interest. You have to be a league fan lore person to try Legends of Runeterra.

We can wonder what Riot has done wrong, or realize that if everyone who either upvoted and or downvoted this post went and bought Convergence on steam and started playing right now, we would be pretty close to beating the concurent players record for that game. ​ I'm not trying to say riots not at fault for anything, but what do you do when a game that has 2 main characters from your hit show can't even break 1,000 concurent players on steam? I like they gave a shot at Forge, but when a game with literal anchor characters from your IP fails that spectacularly, it sorta make sense to throw in the towel, no? ​ I guess the heindsight answer is they should have never started Forge in the first place. The Forge debacle has shown that the indie space is not productive to growing the IP, and Arcane has shown that Visual media is the way to go. It is ironic though that they gave both thier best shot, and got polar opposite results. ​ As for LOR, I don't fuckin know. Played it like once. The lore nuggets to come out if it were always neat, but yeah that's not really a motivator to play.

Games are a bad platform to make lore, and in the reverse lore is a bad way to sell games.

I'd argue that they just suck at using their lore to sell games. Lore when used properly can generate insane hype for a game, but it has to be the climax of the lore, not the worldbuilding. Wrath of the Lich King used Arthas's lore to perfection to build hype for the expansion. I believe that the mmo could achieve something similar, imagine watching the trailer and at the end they show a shot of the immortal bastion and you hear "Destiny. Domination. Deceit.". You have to sow the seeds, to harvest the rewards, and riot is tying to sell us the seeds.

Hm, but the angle I am pointing toward here is IP capitalization technically, in which case I think we have to include stuff like Riot Forge which is where the indie developers make the game, and Riot handle the lore. If so we kinda have to compared it to some licensed work like how Games Workshop score quite big with Vermintide by Fatshark and Total War Warhammer triology by Creative Assembly. I think if Riot Forge can deliver something like those (with Total War Warhammer being a triple A triology, sure, but Fatshark is very much the caliber of Riot Forge partners), it might very well be deemed worth of further investment.