It’s pretty easy to assume that animated shows are trying to sell toys and games to people; that’s been a thing for a very long time now. However, Riot Games’ League of Legends animated series Arcane was apparently not meant to drive sales to the MOBA, according to studio co-founder Marc Merrill.
The discussion springboards from a Bloomberg article that called the show a “financial miss” for Riot, noting the series’ $250M price tag had recovered only a portion of its costs via distribution rights to Netflix and Tencent, while citing anonymous sources who said the studio “didn’t have a robust plan to recoup the cost of the show before it launched.” The publication also pointed to a January layoff round that eliminated 11% of Riot’s workforce and a cratered movie deal.
This in turn brought Marc Merrill out of the woodwork to defend Arcane’s cost as a love letter to the LOL fanbase and not as a cash shop sales driver for the game:
“People who look at the world through a short term, transactional, cynical lens, really struggle to understand Riot. […] 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.
“Do we get everything right? Nope. But 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.
“To be clear, Arcane crushed for players and so it crushed for us.”
What Merrill doesn’t directly address is whether job losses were bundled into the series’ cost, nor the second season’s shorter runtime. Most, but not all, of the replies appear to take the idea of Arcane as a passion project purely at face value with no contemplation of the financial effect on Riot’s rank-and-file workforce across more than just film and television.
