Don’t panic, but another top dev has moved on from Riot Game’s Runeterra MMO, what we usually refer to around here as the Riot MMO.
A little backstory is in order: We’ve been watching the Riot MMO drama since at least 2018 when Marc Merrill was jerking everyone around on whether it was happening; in 2020, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street admitted it was a real thing and that he was in charge. But Street left Riot in 2023, followed by the departure of the principal game designer too, and then last year, the company laid off a staggering 500 people, announced a new-new executive producer for the game, and took the whole project “dark” with some sort of direction-reset.
That leads us to Vijay Thakkar, whose original studio was bought out by Riot back in 2016. He’d moved to technical director, then executive producer in the middle of that, then back to technical director specifically on the Riot MMO R&D team over the last four years. Now he’s left Riot entirely.
Fun fact I didn’t know (so I bet you didn’t either): While Thakkar has clearly made bank on his multiple startup companies, his earliest Linkedin note shows he worked on no less than Star Wars Galaxies as an engineer back in the Jump to Lightspeed/NGE era.
Another fun fact: After principal game designer Justin “Xenogenic” Hanson left the Riot MMO team in 2023, he did a stint at Supervive studio Theorycraft Games… and returned to Riot Games as a “senior game design manager” for R&D again just a few months ago, though he hasn’t precisely said he’s working on the MMO again.
And it’s worth noting that Fabrice Condominas, who was installed as executive producer in Thakkar’s place last year, appears to still be in that role.
All of this is to say that these folks move around kind of a lot, and it seems fruitless to read into the fate of the game itself based on any of it, especially when Riot itself says it’s still in production. But when has that ever stopped MMO fans before?
