News business League of Legends: Arcane, Esports, Projects … Riot Games CEO speaks!
League of Legends was launched in 2009 and is no longer presented. More than 180 million players around the world, from professional esports leagues to global successes, and now many related projects that are successful like the Arcane series on Netflix.
Two years ago, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of League of Legends, Nicolo Laurent, CEO of Riot Games, announced the arrival of many projects, including the fighting game Project L, Hextech Mayhem, Ruined King, Legends of Runeterra, League of Legends: Wild Rift , Teamfight Tactics and of course the series Arcane. Fascinated by the growth of Riot Games and wanting to find out more, our colleagues from 20 Minutes met the CEO, that addressed many topics during a river interview.
Arcane’s success is the result of many wrong turns
Asked the first question evidently concerned Arcane, whose success visibly surprised the makers and managers. Nicolo Laurent explains that they were a little surprised when the scenario was shot because they feared they were “in their bladder” while being convinced of Fortiche’s animation work. It also indicates that the series was born a long way
(…) Only when the project was almost finished did we visit the broadcasters, Netflix & Co. We were convinced that nobody would help us with our ambitions and wanted to be able to stop the project if necessary on the way to these creative and having financial freedom. Besides, we did it. The Fortiche studio had grown from ten to 300, plus a hundred at home. The pilot was nice, but there were problems with the rest of the story, with the pace of the series. We have therefore stopped time to revise history and fortiche (…). More than a year later, the series was resumed.
The company has thought about it too (and still thinks about it from time to time) to broadcast the series itself. But Nicolo Laurent believes that Riot Games is a video game making studio, not a platform. Those responsible therefore turned to SVOD services, but regretted that they could not necessarily distribute the content in the desired manner. When asked about the cross-media development of Riot Games, Nicolo Laurent wanted to qualify. What directs the production of projects for him is the fact that players play, watch series, and work. So Riot tries to create things to cover these activities, everything try not to get lost along the way.
(…) LoL is not just a game, but now also a sport, with leagues, tournaments, stars to admire, professionals to improve … So the game is more fun than being football. The same goes for movies and series, it’s instantly cooler when your favorite characters have a story, a life, relationships. It improves the gaming experience.
An arcane influence on the game?
Of course we can ask ourselves whether the immense success of Arcane had an impact on the game League of Legends. Riot CEO doesn’t give exact numbers, but says the studio tries to quantify this. If more players join Summoner’s Rift, it could give more budget for the series, whose season 2 is already in production.
(…) It’s like esports, even if we’ve lost money – and we’re still losing a little – the effect on the game is enormous. Because the game remains the Eldorado. The margins there are enormous compared to series or esports. Our wish is to expand the universe (…), but also not to exploit it like Marvel (…). There are a lot of Star Wars fans at Riot, everyone is a fan (…), and I would like the same for a video game license like LoL.
One of the most important statements during the interview is the one ab out the creation of new licenses
Valorant, we’ve tried several times in the LoL universe but it didn’t work in terms of gameplay.
Esport as a growth engine
With League of Legends, Riot managed to install an extremely well structured and competitive esports scene, from the world level to the national level. The World Championships are extremely well attended and one only has to look at the success of the Karmine Corp and the LFL to see that it is the same locally. For Nicolo Laurent, esports is a tidal wave, and he believes that by the end of the century, a good half of the TOP 10 most watched sports will actually be eSports. Obviously, the ambition of Riot Games is install two or three games in these top 10 Supposed. When asked about the competition represented by Overwatch and CS: GO in particular, he said:
We are big fans of Blizzard (…). But we’re more at a point where we need to write our own story. So we don’t look so much at the competition, we listen to the players. (…) The relationship between creators and consumers is closer. We can no longer “corner” the player. Before that there was marketing and sales, which of course still exist. But creativity and quality have become core values, and that’s really great.
Through MalloDelic, Journalist igamesnews.com
MP
