It has been known since 2020 that Riot Games is working on an MMORPG to be set in the world of League of Legends. But in 2023, the bad news for the LoL MMORPG is multiplying. After the boss, Ghostcrawler, a second key person is now leaving: the principal game designer Justin Hanson.
What’s the bad news?
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why is he leaving Hanson speaks of a “new adventure that excites him very much” – he will apparently switch to a new company and a new project.
But he says: The MMO team is “absolutely world class”. It was an honor to be part of it.
Why is this bad news? Usually MMORPG developers leave a game after release, when the work is done and it seems appealing to start over somewhere else.
It’s not a good sign that central people are leaving in the middle of development.
With other games like Anthem or Destiny, the departure of key executives during development created a vacuum that caused lasting problems. This problem was felt as a player 3 or 4 years later.
Such central employees are essential for a game, precisely because there are relatively few people working on such a project in the early phase, who first lay the foundations until the team is further expanded in the years before the release.
At this point, a statement from Riot Games would be due on how to compensate for the departure and continue.
Corona pandemic leads to rethinking among gaming developers – home office is tempting
This is behind it: It is not known which project Hanson is going to – it seems likely that he will join Ghostcrawler on their project.
Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street had announced that he would start a gaming studio that would work “purely from home” so that people could be with their families. This seems to be a big trend in the US since the Corona pandemic, including at Riot Games.
Many gaming developers have reconsidered their lives during the Corona pandemic and decided to either exit the industry altogether or switch to small, family-owned companies that are more personal and give them more freedom, especially when it comes to “remote work”.
Riot Games has already said that they were affected by this trend and as a result ran into big problems with LoL: many left the team and the quality of the PC version of LoL plummeted in 2022 and 2023 while recruiting new staff and rebuilding the teams want to set up.
It is quite possible that after Ghostcrawler, Hanson has now also decided against working in a large studio with compulsory attendance in the office and in favor of working from home:
Developer explains why LoL is looking bad on PC: “Many employees quit during Covid”