The series Arcane brought the game League of Legends to Netflix and was considered a major, albeit costly, success. The production costs for Arcane are said to have been very high. A leading business magazine now refers to the series for the LoL developer Riot Games as a “financial flop,” but Riot does not accept this lightly.
This was the accusation: Journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio has a special relationship with Riot Games. In 2018, she published the article “Inside The Culture of Sexism at Riot Games” (via kotaku), which triggered a crisis at the LoL developer Riot Games. The company was accused of sexism and having a culture similar to that of a fraternity.
The article caused years of trouble at Riot Games, and key people were fired. Ultimately, Riot Games had to pay over 100 million US dollars to its female employees.
Journalist D’Anastasio made a name for herself at Kotaku with the article, receiving awards and accolades. Variety called the article the most important piece of gaming journalism of the year, perhaps even of the last few years. Meanwhile, D’Anastasio now works for Bloomberg after the decline of Kotaku. Just before Christmas, she published an article stating:
- The Netflix series Arcane was indeed a hit for Riot Games.
- However, due to the extremely high production costs, the series has turned out to be a “financial failure.”
- According to Bloomberg, the parent company of Riot Games, Tencent, and Netflix contributed only about half of the 250 million dollars to finance the series. Netflix paid 3 million dollars per episode, while Tencent paid another 3 million dollars for the rights to show the series in China. Therefore, the series represents a financial failure for Riot.
The accusation of mismanagement is particularly poignant since Riot Games had to lay off 530 employees in 2024.
Founder of Riot Games responds indignantly on reddit: Cynical and short-sighted view
This is Riot Games’ response: Riot Games co-founder Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill reacted unusually passionately to the accusation. He publicly responded on reddit:
People who view the world through a short-term, transactional, cynical lens really struggle to understand Riot. This has been true for various people who have tried to assert that high-quality free games don’t work, that esports will never work, that our music was crazy, and who now say that Arcane isn’t great and the series wasn’t worth the effort.
These people believe that we make things like Arcane to sell skins, while in reality, we sell skins to make things like Arcane.
Riot is a company that follows a mission. A company where Riot employees constantly strive to improve the player experience. That is why we have successfully done this time and again, in various games and now also in various business areas/media – games, sports, music, and animation. Are we doing everything right? No. But we are not focused on short-term profit – we are focused on providing our audience with exceptional value over the long term, again and again and again.
To be clear: Arcane is for the players and is thus a real hit.
What lies behind this: The accusation that Arcane is a financial failure is truly short-sighted, as Arcane has surely indirectly brought Riot Games a lot of attention and consequently money. The value of Arcane can never be precisely measured in US dollars and skin sales, but a series of such high quality and excitement surely carries significant image benefits that cannot be quantified in monetary terms.
Data from sources like Google Trends shows that Arcane positively impacted interest in LoL, which has likely also boosted skin sales.
And if you really take Merrill at his word, then it doesn’t even matter, as the mere existence of the series is already seen as a win.
However, even if Merrill downplays skin sales a bit with “We sell skins to make things like Arcane,” microtransactions and skins are clearly the core business of Riot Games. In 2024, the studio was heavily criticized for the enormous prices Riot Games asks for some skins, which are seen as luxury items: Riot explains why they made the skin for 500 € and they would do it again
