Arcane Is Riot’s Artistic Success But Financial Failure

In 2022, many people were impressed by the first season of Arcane. In 2024, Riot Games launched the second season of the series, which was still well received by the audience.

According to reports, the co-founder of Riot Games recently said that the production and marketing costs of making two seasons of Arcane totaled $250 million. Netflix and Riot Games’ parent company Tencent need to use $3 million to exchange its broadcast rights for each episode. However, this is still less than half of the cost of Riot Games to make Arcane.

Arcane

League of Legends is an old game that has been born for 15 years and still has a large player base. Each hero in LOL has his own unique background story and power. In the first few years, the background stories of some heroes were a bit confusing. Then Riot Games spent some time to sort out, rewrite and integrate the background stories, and gradually created an almost perfect League of Legends universe.

As Riot Games grew and grew, they gradually came up with the idea of ​​turning the background stories into formal series. Finally, they made a bold move. Riot decided to make its own series about the background story of League of Legends. They wanted to keep full control of the characters. In 2020, Riot hired Spenley, who had worked at Netflix Inc., to form a team, which then expanded to 25 people.

Riot hopes to use Arcane as a gift to players and attract more players to play their games. League of Legends has been operating for many years, and the number of players is decreasing. This is the dilemma that Riot Games is facing now.

Riot hopes to open another path with Arcane, or even become another Disney company.

However, the budget of the series exceeded their expectations. Riot originally planned to make a profit in the second season, but the situation does not seem to have changed much.

How Arcane Makes Money?

In fact, some employees within Riot do not support the development of Arcane. Nicolo Laurent, the former CEO of Riot, invested too much passion in Arcane, which squeezed out resources about the game of League of Legends itself. Laurent tried to develop more value for the game of LOL, not just the game itself.

But when Arcane’s first season was released, Riot did not give item designers enough time to design Arcane-related items, which is one of the reasons why players only saw four skins in the first season, and three of them were free. Arcane did attract a lot of players for Riot in the first season, but the player retention rate was very low and did not meet Riot’s expectations.

Although Arcane was not commercially successful, it won many awards, which excited the Arcane production team and Riot.

After that, they gave Arcane two years to make related items for Arcane, but the profit still did not seem to meet their expectations.

Riot’s Explanation

Although Arcane did not bring profits to Riot, a Riot spokesperson said that the show was successful, at least in November, it was Riot’s highest-income month. They hope that the show can bring more players to the game to increase player consumption.

With T1 winning this year’s world championship and the release of Arcane, Riot took advantage of the opportunity to launch expensive skins, even up to hundreds of dollars. Players complained on Reddit that Riot Games has forgotten its original intention and only releases these mass-produced skins to perfunctory players. Marc Merrill, co-founder of Riot Games, responded that they did not create such a wonderful work as Arcane to promote their own skins. On the contrary, they launched so many skins just to create wonderful music and animation like Arcane.

Adjustment Of Riot Games

However, from the perspective of Riot Games, it seems that it has suspended the idea of ​​continuing to enter the film and television industry. They laid off 11% of their employees at the beginning of this year and announced that they would focus their future work back on the game industry. They suspended the subsequent production of Arcane and also suspended the adaptation and development of other works. Shauna Spenley, president of Riot Games, resigned and reorganized the entertainment department.

Reasons For Failure

In fact, it is not the first time that a game has been adapted into a movie and faced such a failure. Nintendo had experienced a similar failure in 1993. Publishers are accustomed to licensing their characters to Hollywood film companies to transfer possible risks. Riot Games suffered a financial failure, and it is obvious that they did not consider how to make a profit from their works.

Adapting video games into animations or movies is a current trend, but it is clear that Riot Games still lacks a lot of experience in this regard.

On the other hand, the second season of Arcane did not satisfy gamers. Although the content of both series can be regarded as excellent productions, their content does not match the background stories that players know. The content of Arcane’s adaptation also changes the background settings of the game. It is difficult to say whether this large-scale adaptation method is a good thing or a bad thing.

Whatever, fans still hope that Riot Games can continue to promote the production of the series. Completely develop the entire game map. This is a very big challenge. Maybe Riot Games will not try this method in the short term, but they have not given up. Maybe Riot Games will not give up their project to continue developing the background story of League of Legends, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to tell the background stories by games.