"MMO is insanity": League of Legends co-founder explains why Riot is making one anyway
Aleksandr Manin
Marc Merrill, co-founder and co-chairman of Riot Games, appeared on the Lemonade Stand podcast and answered an uncomfortable question about the League of Legends MMO. The hosts pointed out that the genre's core audience has long since grown up, these people have less and less free time, and World of Warcraft still takes the lion's share of it. Merrill didn't argue: he agreed with the concerns and admitted there are plenty of sensible reasons not to do what Riot is doing right now.
MMOs are insane. The scale, the expectations, the complexity, the talk that it's a niche genre: all of that is true. But there are plenty of decisions you can make when choosing your approach to a game like this.
According to Merrill, the studio's main trump card is its fans. Riot has been building the world of Runeterra for 20 years, and millions of players have developed a real attachment to its characters and factions. People want to live in this world, and the studio wants to give them that chance. Riot deliberately held off on tackling the genre: it first needed hundreds of millions of fans around the world, stable sources of revenue and a strong team. Now it has all of that, but the main question, Merrill says, remains open: can the studio do the universe justice? He considers making a game "for everyone" a mistake, because a project that is too diluted ends up being wanted by no one.
Merrill doesn't hide the difficulties and calls them challenges worth getting out of bed for. Besides, this isn't the studio's first time: League of Legends, Riot itself and the series Arcane were all, by his account, once considered "insanity and foolishness" as well. In September at PAX West he said that inside the studio the project is jokingly called "the Grail," because plenty of brave knights will die in the search for that holy relic.
Players do have reason for caution, though. In August Riot announced that it will end active development of the fighting game 2XKO in December, less than a year after its console release: the studio admitted the game didn't have enough players to stay afloat. The MMO's own history hasn't been smooth either. The project was announced in 2020 by Greg Street, former lead systems designer on World of Warcraft, but he left Riot in 2023. In 2024 development was restarted because the previous version looked too much like existing games in the genre.
The project is now led by executive producer Fabrice Condominas, and several World of Warcraft veterans have joined the team: Raymond Bartos, Orlando Salvatore and Brian Holinka. The League of Legends MMO has no official name, platforms or release date yet, and Riot is in no hurry to show the game.
Do you think Riot can pull off an MMO, or is the genre really too insane even for the creators of League of Legends?