Riot Forge boss "would love" to publish a League of Legends dating sim

gamedeveloper.com:

In the last two years Riot Games' publishing division Riot Forge has finally begun to bear fruit. The company has worked with developers like Double Stallion Games, Airship Syndicate, and Digital Sun to release games like Convergence, Ruined King, and Mageseeker, each with the subheading A League of Legends Story.

That's because Riot Forge has a somewhat unusual job as a game publisher: it's a business dedicated to expanding the world of megapopular MOBA League of Legends through video games starring various League of Legends characters.

That's a fairly unusual position for a publisher to be in. What kind of metrics define success? How does it identify the developers it wants to partner with? And maybe most importantly, why are studios not named Riot Games being trusted to tell key stories in Runeterra, the setting of League of Legends?

Riot Forge creative director Rowan Parker was keen to discuss these topics—and to explain why he one day might sign off on a League of Legends dating sim.

Parker's been with Riot for a long time. He was the former lead "modes" designer on League of Legends, where he led development on limited-time game modes like Ultra Rapid Fire, Butcher's Bridge, and Ascension. These modes were often promotional events for the general League of Legends experience, and were sometimes developed to promote new champion releases.

That means Parker's spent a lot of time looking at Riot's expansive cast of characters and their various homelands, interacting with the studio's narrative team and learning about who they were as characters. And all the while, he and Riot had to grapple with the fact that a 5v5 MOBA is not a great vehicle for interactive storytelling.

For example, one of Parker's narrative-adjacent