Riot Forge

» see forge.riotgames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Riot Games spent a decade as a company with one game. Riot Forge, announced in December 2019, was the answer to the obvious question about everything else in the League of Legends world: the lore, the champions with backstories nobody had played through, the parts of Runeterra that existed only as splash art and patch notes. Forge commissioned outside studios and published what they made, with none of it built in-house.

Six games came out under the label. Airship Syndicate's Ruined King and Choice Provisions' Hextech Mayhem both landed in 2021. Then 2023 delivered three at once, The Mageseeker from Digital Sun, Convergence from Double Stallion and Song of Nunu from Tequila Works. Bandle Tale, by Lazy Bear Games, shipped in February 2024.

By then the label was gone. On 22 January 2024 Riot cut around 530 roles, about 11 percent of its workforce, and chief executive Dylan Jadeja pointed at development costs that had grown past what the company was willing to carry. Forge was judged not central to where Riot was going. I was 40 that year and working on drone vision, not on the single-player spinoffs of a game I had watched other people play, so this one I followed the way you follow any layoff round in an industry next to your own.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ six games in four years ~

The Forge catalog was deliberately unlike Riot's own output. Ruined King was a turn-based RPG. Hextech Mayhem was a rhythm runner. Song of Nunu was a puzzle-adventure about a boy and a yeti, and Convergence was a 2D action platformer with a time-rewind mechanic. None of them were competitive, none of them wanted your evenings for years, and all of them assumed you might care about Runeterra without ever having queued for a match.

That was the argument for the label and, commercially, the argument against it. A single-player game from a studio of thirty people carries no live-service tail. It sells for a few weeks and then it is a catalog item, which is a perfectly normal way to run a games business unless you are sitting next to one of the most profitable free-to-play titles ever made.

~ the marketing problem ~

Critics who liked the Forge games kept reaching for the same explanation for why so few people bought them, which was that Riot barely told anyone the games existed. The label supported independent developers and gave them access to one of the most recognizable fictional worlds in the medium, then released their work with a fraction of the noise Riot generates for a new champion.

The League of Legends audience is enormous and it is also very specifically an audience for League of Legends, so converting some share of it into buyers of a paid rhythm game about Ziggs turned out to be a harder ask than the strategy assumed.

~ what closed with it ~

Forge going away did not erase the six games; they are still for sale and still work. What ended was the route that got them made, a publishing arm inside Riot whose whole purpose was handing the setting to people outside the building. Legends of Runeterra took its own hit in the same layoffs, with the card game pushed toward its single-player mode and away from the competitive one.

The month between the label's closure and Bandle Tale's release is the detail worth keeping. A game finished, tested and dated can arrive into a world where the publisher that ordered it no longer exists, and nothing in the store page will tell you.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »