Anime steampunk spin-off Arcane just wrapped up its second and final season on Netflix. While the League of Legends show cost $250 million to produce and didn’t make that money back, Riot Games cofounder Marc Merrill now says the company still considers the show a success because of how much fans loved it.
“We are not focused on the short term extraction of profits—we are focused on delivering exceptional value to our audience over the long term, again and again and again,” the executive wrote in the Reddit comments below a link to a story from Bloomberg about how the League of Legends spin-off failed to pay for itself. “To be clear, Arcane crushed for players and so it crushed for us.”
Bloomberg reported earlier this week that one of Riot’s goals with Arcane was that the hit Netflix animated series would funnel people back into the free-to-play game, where they would then spend money on Arcane-themed skins and other digital items. The strategy didn’t pay off, however, fueling concerns at owner Tencent about Riot straying from its core mission of being a game company.
Riot announced a series of layoffs throughout 2024, with some impacting its League of Legends PC team. Those came following an expansion into transmedia properties like Arcane as well as investment in several new games that never quite took off or were cancelled before release, like a platform fighter in the vein of Smash Bros. “We are refocusing on fewer, high-impact projects to move us toward a more sustainable future,” CEO Dylan Jadeja wrote back at the start of 2024.
Last month, Merrill dismissed rumors that Arcane was originally supposed to be more than two seasons but had its run cut short due to overspending. More recently, he tried to explain how the show could be both a success and also still be abandoned by the company. “People who look at the world through a short term, transactional, cynical lens, really struggle to understand Riot,” he wrote on Reddit.
He continued, “This has been true with various people trying to claim that high quality free games won’t work, that esports will never work, that our music was insane, are now saying that Arcane wasn’t awesome and worth it. These people think we make things like Arcane to sell skins, when in reality we sell skins to make things like Arcane. Riot is a mission driven company where Rioters are constantly striving to make it better to be a player. That is why we have successfully done that over and over again across multiple games and now multiple businesses / mediums – games, sports, music & animation.”
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