The Arcane series brought the game League of Legends to Netflix and was considered a great, albeit expensive, success. Because the production costs for Arcane are said to have been very high. A leading business magazine is now calling the series a “financial flop” for LoL developer Riot Games, but Riot won’t let that go.
This was the accusation: Journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio has a special relationship with Riot Games. She published the article “Inside The Culture of Sexism at Riot Games” in 2018 (via kotaku), which sparked a crisis at LoL developer Riot Games. The company was accused of sexism and a fraternity-like culture.
The article caused trouble at Riot Games for years and important people were fired. Ultimately, Riot Games had to pay over $100 million to employees.
The journalist D’Anastasio made a name for herself with the article at Kotaku and received prizes and awards. Variety called the article the most important piece of gaming coverage of the year, perhaps even the last few years. D’Anastasio now works for Bloomberg following the demise of Kotaku. Shortly before Christmas she published an article in the business magazine that says:
The accusation of mismanagement is also so piquant because Riot Games had to lay off 530 employees in 2024.
That’s how much Arcane cost
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Riot Games founder responds indignantly on reddit: Cynical and short-term view
This is Riot Games’ response: The co-founder of Riot Games, Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill, reacted to the accusation with unusual passion. He responded publicly on Reddit:
People who view the world through a short-term, transactional, cynical lens really have difficulty understanding Riot. This has been the case with various people who have tried to say that quality free games don’t work, that esports will never work, that our music was crazy and now they’re saying that Arcane isn’t great and the series is Wasn’t worth the effort.
These people think that we make things like Arcane to sell skins, when 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 player lives. That’s why we’ve done this successfully over and over again, in different games and now in different businesses/media – games, sports, music and animation. Are we doing everything right? No. But we’re not focused on making short-term profits – we’re focused on delivering exceptional long-term value to our audience, again and again and again.
To be clear: Arcane is for the players and therefore also for a real blast.
This is what lies behind it: The accusation that Arcane is a financial failure is really intended to be short-term, because Arcane certainly indirectly brought Riot Games a lot of attention and therefore money. You will never be able to measure the value of Aracne exactly in US dollars and skin sales, but such a high-quality and exciting series certainly brings with it a significant image gain that cannot be calculated in monetary terms.
Data from Google Trends, for example, shows that Arcane had a positive effect on interest in LoL and thus probably boosted skin sales.
And if you really take Merrill at his word, then that doesn’t even matter; just the fact that the series exists at all is seen as a win.
But even if Merrill somewhat dismisses the skin sales here with “We sell skins to do things like Arcane,” the microtransactions and skins are clearly the core business of Riot Games. Especially in 2024, the studio was sharply criticized for what Riot Games charges huge prices for some skins that are seen as luxury items: Riot explains why they made the skin for €500 and they would do it again