The League of Legends-inspired series Arcane may be the most expensive animated series ever produced, and unfortunately, despite the stellar reception, it didn’t manage to make much of the money spent back. But apparently, Riot doesn’t care too much about that part.
Bloomberg reported that the amounts that Netflix and Tencent paid Riot less than half of the $250 million it cost to make the series. Bloomberg also claimed that four people who were familiar with Arcane’s production said that Riot didn’t have a plan to recoup the lost revenue.
Despite Riot firing 11% of its staff earlier this year, Riot’s co-founder Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill says that as far as they are concerned, Arcane was a huge success:
“People who look at the world through a short-term, transactional, cynical lens really struggle to understand Riot. This has been true with various people trying to claim that high-quality free games won’t work, that esports will never work, that our music was insane, and are now saying that Arcane wasn’t awesome and worth it.
“These people think we make things like Arcane to sell skins when, in reality, we sell skins to make things like Arcane. Riot is a mission-driven company where Rioters are constantly striving to make it better to be a player. That is why we have successfully done that over and over again across multiple games and now multiple businesses/mediums—games, sports, music & animation. Do we get everything right? Nope. But we are not focused on the short-term extraction of profits—we are focused on delivering exceptional value to our audience over the long term, again and again and again. To be clear, Arcane crushed for players, and so it crushed for us.”
Riot’s renowned for its incredibly expensive skins. Earlier this year, it released a $500 Ahri skin and then later fired the artist responsible for making it, as well as announcing a new exalted skins tier list days after even more layoffs, which see players having to roll the dice for nicer skins. Considering how much money Arcane costs, it’s not really that surprising that Riot is using its skins made for whales to fund creative projects like series.
However, Arcane couldn’t have been that much of a car crash. Riot recently confirmed that it is looking into making more League of Legends-inspired shows that will explore three new regions: Noxus, Ionia, and Demacia. I think we’ll probably see Noxus next after the Swain teaser at the end of the last Arcane episode, but honestly, after the superb quality of Arcane’s second season, I would be happy with just about anything.