Free steampunk anime Arkan just finished its second and final season on Netflix. While the League of Legends The show cost $250 million to produce and didn't make that money back, Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill now says the company still believes the show is a success because of how much fans have loved it.
“We're not focused on making short-term profits – we're focused on delivering great value to our audience over the long term, over and over again.” again,” said the executive. he wrote in the Reddit comments below is a link to a story from Bloomberg about how League of Legends spinoff didn't pay for itself. “To be clear, Arkan crushed for players so it crushed for us.”
Bloomberg reported earlier this week was one of Riot's goals Arkan that the hit Netflix animated series would bring people back to the free-to-play game, where they would then spend money on Arkan-themed skins and other digital objects. The strategy did not pay off, however, raising concerns at the owner Tencent about Riot departing from its main mission to be a game company.
Riot announced a series of layoffs throughout 2024, with some influencing it League of Legends PC group. These came after expansion into transmedia properties like Arkan as well as investing in a number of new games that didn't launch or were canceled before release, as a fighter platform in the vein of Smash Bros. “We are refocusing on fewer high impact projects to move us towards a more sustainable future,” said CEO Dylan Jadeja written back at the beginning of 2024.
Last month, Merrill rumors dismissed that Arkan it was originally supposed to last two seasons but its run was cut short due to cost overruns. Recently, he tried to explain how the show could be both successful and also be abandoned by the company. “People who view the world through a short-term, functional, cynical lens really struggle to understand Riot,” he wrote on Reddit.
He continued, “It's been true with a lot of people trying to say that high quality free games won't work, esports will never work, that our music was crazy, now saying that Arkan it wasn't terrible and it was worth it. These people think we do things like that Arkan to sell skins, when we actually sell skins to make such things Arkan. Riot is a mission-driven company where Rioters are always striving to make it better to be a player. That's why we've done that successfully time and time again across multiple games and now multiple industries/mediums – games, sports, music & animation.”
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