Riot’s new head of League Studio on the ‘balancing act’ of updating a multiverse
The League of Legends franchise has inexorably expanded over the past few years, growing from just being a MOBA to having a multiverse full of colorful takes on familiar characters — there’s a stand-alone RPG, a mobile port, a critically acclaimed animated show on Netflix, and a forthcoming novel. League of Legends itself is 10 years old, and despite these new additions, it has remained, at its core, League — a competitive 5v5 game that takes place across a map with three lanes and a jungle full of dangerous monsters.
On Wednesday, Riot announced that Andrei Van Roon, a veteran of the studio who has designed champions like Ziggs and Lissandra, would be taking on the role of head of League Studio. Van Roon will oversee production of League of Legends, its mobile port Wild Rift, and the auto-chess spinoff Teamfight Tactics.
As of 2022, the League franchise has dozens of characters spread across its mainline titles, each of whom has their own needs in terms of both technical maintenance and new content. Riot is faced with the daunting task of keeping things fresh, all while working on a title that has accrued a decade of various visual and technical debts. Polygon spoke with Van Roon about how League will grow in the coming years.
League of Legends has a two-week patch cycle; there’s consistently something coming out, even if it’s just balance adjustments or smaller changes. This cadence is popular with fans; Van Roon says it’s critical to both League’s success and to avoiding a culture of continual crunch.
“I found out fairly recently that before League launched, one of the requirements that Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck had was that they were willing to sacrifice quite a lot of other functionality to get the ability to
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