Amid live-service flops, Riot co-founder says player expectations are "going up," while League and Valorant thrive from the competition: "We have to calibrate constantly"
The co-founder of League of Legends and Valorant developer Riot Games says the secret to the studio's live-service wins is competition.
It's no secret that making a live-service game in 2024 is an incredibly risky move, with high-profile, big budget releases like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Concord being just two recent reminders of that fact. Meawhile, Riot's two big live-service offerings, the enduring League of Legends and the more recent but still very popular competitive shooter Valorant, are the model for success.
Gizmodo recently asked Riot co-founder Marc Merrill what's in the secret sauce that makes the studio's games so popular, and he explained the importance of identifying player demand and then consistently one-upping competitors.
"The way we think about creating anything new, including Valorant, is we identify a particular player need, then try to put together a team that needs to deeply relate to that player need and then be incredibly willing to make all the million small decisions necessary to bring that thing to life," Merrill said. "That is a bar that moves every year, not just based on what we do, but on whatever everybody else does. We have to calibrate constantly. That’s how we think about everything, including Arcane and Valorant.
"As the world continues to evolve, there’s more great things available [and] player expectations going up," Merrill said. "Competition benefits the consumer, and our goal is to make it better to be a player. When other companies do great things, we’re thrilled. Then we’ve got to up our game. Necessity is the mother of all invention. That creates the conditions for us to push ourselves and figure out what else can we do."
League of Legends has been around for more than 15 years and is in season 14 currently, while Valorant launched back in 2020 and is wrapping up Episode 9: Collision, with the first Act of Episode 10 set to begin in January. The studio also has a fighting game spinoff and a League of
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