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A Sneaker Broker posted:https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/2024-player-update It wouldn't surprise me if the only things at Riot that are really making money are Valorant, TFT, and League. We know that esports is a loss leader for them and there's no way Netflix is paying enough for Arcane for it to be profitable. Wouldn't surprise me if Riot Music projects also get reeled back to working exclusively on stuff immediately relevant to the games rather than all the off-shoot bands. And the MMO must be consuming atrocious amounts of cash with no release date on the horizon. Sucks, but even Riot doesn't actually have infinite money.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:25
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1stGear posted:It wouldn't surprise me if the only things at Riot that are really making money are Valorant, TFT, and League. We know that esports is a loss leader for them and there's no way Netflix is paying enough for Arcane for it to be profitable. Wouldn't surprise me if Riot Music projects also get reeled back to working exclusively on stuff immediately relevant to the games rather than all the off-shoot bands. And the MMO must be consuming atrocious amounts of cash with no release date on the horizon. They'll probably get a loan from Daddy Tencent.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:26
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A Sneaker Broker posted:They'll probably get a loan from Daddy Tencent. i mean, part of the reason riot's refocusing in this way is likely because tencent's severely tightening its own belt over those possible MTX changes being pushed through the national people's congress
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Jan 23, 2024 00:28
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They also publicly shared the internal message about the layoffs. https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/2024-rioter-update Laid off staff will be getting: quote:Severance Pay — We’ll offer a minimum 6 months of salary, which includes notice period for all Rioters whose roles are going away, and more for those with longer tenure, in line with local laws.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:30
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I wonder how much the League of Legends™ name brand improved the sales of the riot forge games vs how many it drove away because of the level of cringe the League of Legends™ name brand invokes.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:32
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:I wonder how much the League of Legends™ name brand improved the sales of the riot forge games vs how many it drove away because of the level of cringe the League of Legends™ name brand invokes. I'm really hoping that they have enough confidence in Arcane S2 to drop that very stupid subtitle.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:36
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"Health Benefits — In locations where Riot provides healthcare, Rioters covered by our health benefits will continue to be covered through their last day of employment." Wow!
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Jan 23, 2024 00:40
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Verviticus posted:"Health Benefits — In locations where Riot provides healthcare, Rioters covered by our health benefits will continue to be covered through their last day of employment." I mean you cut off the part where they're also giving additional health pay beyond the severance to tide them over until they find something else.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:44
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edit: oh yeah i misread it that first sentence doesnt need to be there at all, and its part of the whole thing thats trying to paper over the fact that they're firing people. but its not about shareholders or whatever
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Jan 23, 2024 00:49
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A Sneaker Broker posted:Riot is about to go all in on their MMO and needs as many resources as possible. They are now banking on Arcane and other titles to build the world, so their future investment pays off. See I kinda interpreted this as a sign that maybe the MMO is being written off as a failed project and now they are just rallying to what's making money currently. It's already known as a current project but there's no mention of it except for the "there are various projects at various stages of R&D development". And that feels like the sort of thing you'd want to reassure people about in a message about cutting a bunch of projects/etc. Like they did by making clear that the fighting game is still undergoing development. Rip Runeterra though, it was kinda a fun game and I'm sure there's quite a few people who will miss it once it's fully in maintenance mode. JuniperCake fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Jan 23, 2024 |
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Jan 23, 2024 01:09
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Going by some light Googling, Valorant started development in 2014 and wasn't officially announced until 2020 (and released just a few months later). Project L probably started development in 2016 when Riot bought the studio that L's leadership was making a different game under and it didn't get officially announced until 2021. So Riot continuing to be silent on the MMO isn't out of sync with their other development timetables. Its just that this particular project got sort of soft-announced early because they needed to massively staff up for it and Ghostcrawler knew it would leak anyway.
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Jan 23, 2024 01:19
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1stGear posted:Going by some light Googling, Valorant started development in 2014 and wasn't officially announced until 2020 (and released just a few months later). Project L probably started development in 2016 when Riot bought the studio that L's leadership was making a different game under and it didn't get officially announced until 2021. So Riot continuing to be silent on the MMO isn't out of sync with their other development timetables. Its just that this particular project got sort of soft-announced early because they needed to massively staff up for it and Ghostcrawler knew it would leak anyway. Also this was gonna take a lot longer to make than any other project. They needed veterans from around the VGC to get in now to built the foundation. Especially with how popular the Runeterra IP is.
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Jan 23, 2024 01:40
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Also bear in mind they never actually announced the MMO so I don't see why they would officially announce it in a post like this. If they did people would probably just go 'oh look Riot announced the MMO to distract from the layoffs' and they probably wouldn't be wrong.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:02
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:I wonder how much the League of Legends™ name brand improved the sales of the riot forge games vs how many it drove away because of the level of cringe the League of Legends™ name brand invokes. Whenever I saw Nintendo Direct reaction videos and they showed a Riot Forge game the interest level immediately went to zero when the person saw “League of Legends” even when it was something like Song of Nunu. I don’t doubt a bunch of people who would’ve really loved a game like Convergence never even looked at it because it said League of Legends on it. There were certainly a bunch of people who were and still are resistant to watching Arcane because of that. The LoR stuff is really unsurprising given that Mortdog of the TFT team was making jokes on his stream about it being the unloved child less than 3 months after it launched. Just never seemed like it gained any traction against Hearthstone and Magic Arena.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:10
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it's a drat shame, too, since the LoR team had some insane creativity and managed to match the house style and aesthetics of league proper better than i've seen anyone do outside of arcane. the redesigns of champs like seraphine and nidalee are something i'd absolutely want ported over to the main game, no question
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Jan 23, 2024 02:13
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It was impossible for LoR to make any money with their business model and the game honestly came out 5 years too late.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:21
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lol
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Jan 23, 2024 02:28
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LoR not taking off is a drat shame in my eyes, people are dug in too deep with predatory card game prices and don't want to sunk cost their $5,000 hearthstone purchases by going to a different card game. I feel like they could of advertised it better in the league client or elsewhere or done some cross-promotion "Play 10 LoR games and get the "Runeterra" Champion Skin in League of Legends for free!" treatment.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:39
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:LoR not taking off is a drat shame in my eyes, people are dug in too deep with predatory card game prices and don't want to sunk cost their $5,000 hearthstone purchases by going to a different card game. That kind of cross promotion always sucks though, people come in, throw 10 games as fast as possible to get the skin and leave. You don't really get any long term benefit from it, as any Heroes of the Storm player would attest from when Blizzard did these kinds of promos for Overwatch skins. It just made the game unplayable for a few weeks.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:44
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Fair, though it could also be "sign up a account and beat the tutorial" or "win 1 pvp match or beat the first path of champions"
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Jan 23, 2024 02:48
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1stGear posted:It wouldn't surprise me if the only things at Riot that are really making money are Valorant, TFT, and League. ding ding ding I am uh :cough: pretty familiar with how R&D goes at riot and in general a game goes from prototype to production in like... 8-9 years. It sounds like corporate smoke blowing, but they really do mean it when they say we want to put out the best game we can (costs and dev time be damned). Sometimes that means you get something awesome out the door and sometimes that means a cool as poo poo concept gets canned/rebooted because it didn't hit the mark. Layoffs aren't surprising, sadly. riot hired a shitload of people during the pandemic and the now-CEO was previously the CFO, so, ya know. we find out in a couple hours if my partner still has a job :/
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Jan 23, 2024 02:53
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LoR games could just take way too long if the opponent roped every decision, I don't think they had a chance to get the Hearthstone crowd which is much simpler on that point.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:53
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Runeterra is the one moment where the League of Legends universe has had any sort of thematic cohesion. Arcane's good but it specifically limits itself to Piltover & Zaun, in part because of how off-balanced the setting is. Closest the brand's gotten to feeling like a world, rather than a bundle of poorly thought-out heroes that each exist to be mildly cool. Shame that it's transitioning to a skeleton crew. Game itself was fun too.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:56
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Feisty-Cadaver posted:riot hired a shitload of people during the pandemic This is basically the story of every company and makes me want to slap every idiot money guy who didn't stop to think for 5 seconds whether the boost in money from people being stuck with nothing to do but play videogames would last.
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Jan 23, 2024 02:59
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Feisty-Cadaver posted:ding ding ding appreciate the inside baseball; the high level of quality is something i've grown to respect from riot, but it really seems like it balances the company on a knife's edge with the expectation that league and valorant will continue to be cash cows in the near future (which isn't necessarily an unfair assumption, but still a drat small basket to put all your eggs in) best of luck to you and your partner, losing a job loving sucks even with a generous severance
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Jan 23, 2024 02:59
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Firebert posted:It was impossible for LoR to make any money with their business model and the game honestly came out 5 years too late. LoR dev was particularly cursed. It was the first game riot tried to make after league, and launching Product Number Two is notoriously difficult. It was first made in partnership with another studio who at one point said "hey this game is great ship it!" and riot was like "nah not good enough" so that partner left, the game got rebooted a couple times, but eventually got to a state that felt really good. then hearthstone came out and the team said "well, poo poo." runeterra gameplay was still solid but blizzard being blizzard said what if we make a tcg that actually looks cool? so tack on a couple more years or whatever to make it look better it's too bad; i think the game is p loving great, but riot had several windows that they just missed.
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Jan 23, 2024 03:02
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if i was a riot exec, the knowledge that i could've gotten out in front of hearthstone would haunt my dreams every night, jesus
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Jan 23, 2024 03:08
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Vermain posted:if i was a riot exec, the knowledge that i could've gotten out in front of hearthstone would haunt my dreams every night, jesus I wonder if the lesson learned from that is why they whipped out TFT pretty quick.
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Jan 23, 2024 03:13
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Vermain posted:if i was a riot exec, the knowledge that i could've gotten out in front of hearthstone would haunt my dreams every night, jesus Reminds me of the story of one of the Bubsy 3D devs seeing Mario 64 for the first time at a trade show and having a panic attack knowing it was coming out before their game.
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Jan 23, 2024 03:13
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njsykora posted:This is basically the story of every company and makes me want to slap every idiot money guy who didn't stop to think for 5 seconds whether the boost in money from people being stuck with nothing to do but play videogames would last. What's interesting is that league had a p significant rebound in players before the pandemic, which is wild to think about given league was like 10+ years old at that point.
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Jan 23, 2024 03:14
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1stGear posted:I wonder if the lesson learned from that is why they whipped out TFT pretty quick. Yeah, pretty much on the nose. They got there quickly at the cost of some enormous tech debt. I think I posted this before, but the fact that they got the league engine to run on iOS and android is pretty goddamn impressive.
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Jan 23, 2024 03:18
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Feisty-Cadaver posted:What's interesting is that league had a p significant rebound in players before the pandemic, which is wild to think about given league was like 10+ years old at that point. i'm gonna chalk that one up to a combination of them nailing K/DA as a marketing tool and overwatch absolutely making GBS threads the bed in 2018 with brigitte's release and the rise of GOATS
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Jan 23, 2024 03:18
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Wild rift should be making money too, I feel.
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Jan 23, 2024 03:21
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wild rift does okay but they got beaten to the mobile moba punch by a bunch of chinese and korean studios
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Jan 23, 2024 03:22
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Endorph posted:wild rift does okay but they got beaten to the mobile moba punch by a bunch of chinese and korean studios And the other plan for Wild Rift (Console Client) appears to have stalled out into a puff of smoke.
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Jan 23, 2024 03:24
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Endorph posted:wild rift does okay but they got beaten to the mobile moba punch by a bunch of chinese and korean studios yeah, mobile legends already ate up most of the eastern market before wild rift arrived, and it doesn't seem especially popular in the west compared to regular PC league
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Jan 23, 2024 03:26
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From what I understand, Wild Rift's doing pretty well in eastern countries, but is basically dead in the west. It missed the boom for mobile MOBA's over here by a good margin (Vainglory was on a skeleton crew by the time it came out), and english markets have a natural disrespect for mobile games that meant the traditional esports marketing wasn't gonna work.
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Jan 23, 2024 03:28
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If you already have a PC and are playing LoL there's a not a lot of reasons to play the mobile version, not like I'm trying to play LoL on the train. And if you don't have that brand loyalty it's just another moba on the app store.
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Jan 23, 2024 03:29
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Neurolimal posted:From what I understand, Wild Rift's doing pretty well in eastern countries, but is basically dead in the west. It missed the boom for mobile MOBA's over here by a good margin (Vainglory was on a skeleton crew by the time it came out), and english markets have a natural disrespect for mobile games that meant the traditional esports marketing wasn't gonna work. one of the top upvoted comments i saw in their yearly update video was someone asking what they were going to do to address wild rift's "ranked issues," which usually isn't a good sign for a competitive game's health
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Jan 23, 2024 03:30
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Endorph posted:wild rift does okay but they got beaten to the mobile moba punch by a bunch of chinese and korean studios The irony there being the most popular one was published by another tencent studio who wholesale ripped off league champs really blatantly. which eventually ended up w/ tencent giving riot a truckload of cash in compensation These days the wild rift dev team is 90+% a different tencent studio, so the circle of life is complete. idk if that's public info plz don't sue me. Feisty-Cadaver fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Jan 23, 2024 |
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Jan 23, 2024 03:42
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