Riot Games reportedly lost money on Arcane, but it doesn't publicly care

The second season of Arcane became a major event not only for League of Legends players worldwide. Many TV show enthusiasts and Netflix viewers got seriously interested in the lore of Zaun and Piltover, with some even deciding to install LoL to play the game. However, according to Bloomberg, the hype surrounding Arcane didn’t translate into financial success.

If we are to believe the article, payments from Netflix and Tencent for the rights to show the series globally and in China, respectively, didn’t even cover half of the production costs. Furthermore, according to sources at Riot, Bloomberg claims that League of Legends failed to attract a sufficient number of new players, nor did it manage to make existing players spend more money—making Arcane a financial failure.

Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill commented on the article, stating that Riot doesn’t think in terms of immediate profit and that, for the company, the project was a success.

Image: reddit.com

However, one cannot overlook a bit of deceit in this statement. Both Marc Merrill and Cecilia d’Anastasio, the Bloomberg article’s author, mention esports and the fact that it was unprofitable for a long time. Yet recent events—regional consolidation, abandonment of smaller leagues, reduced financial support for teams, and allowing teams to make money from betting companies—along with significant layoffs within the company, indicate that Riot Games is starting to count its money.

Add to that the controversial, costly Jinx skin, and we can conclude that Riot Games probably wouldn’t have made these decisions if all its projects, including League of Legends, were thriving. It’s clear that large companies (such as Riot Games) can afford long-term investments, but League of Legends is no longer in a growth stage, so this strategy doesn’t seem very effective.

No matter how much you claim to aim to improve the world or create top-tier products, the ultimate goal of business is to make money, and money is the final metric for business decisions.

Main image: alphacoders.com