After a surprisingly bad start to 2024 for AAA Publishers and Studios, Riot Games becomes that latest AAA publisher to let down their fans this year.
Ever since its announcement in 2020, the Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game that Riot Games began developing was set to be released sometime in 2025. It was the most highly anticipated MMO in recent years, and with good reason. Riot Games developed and continues to live operate League of Legends, Valorant, and TeamFight Tactics; which have been the most popular MOBA, FPS, and Strategy games respectively on the market right ever since their releases. The logical conclusion of any gamer would be if they can dominate these genres, they should be able to dominate the MMO genre as well. While this may well be true, fans will not be able to see for themselves in 2025, and maybe not even in 2030.
On March 20th, 2024 in a thread on X (formerly known as Twitter), co-founder of Riot Games, Marc Merrill, posted that the Riot MMO has reset the direction of the game and will be “going dark” for the next several years at least. This essentially means that nearly everything that has been developed for the Riot MMO over the past four plus years will be scrapped and there will be no announcements regarding the Riot MMO for the next several years.
While the sentiment surrounding this announcement is supposed to be good according to Marc Merrill, anyone in the gaming industry knows that this type of announcement is a death sentence for most games in development. With nothing new being announced for several years, fans will undoubtedly lose interest and investors might even begin to feel the same way. This type of announcement has 50/50 chance of ending one of two ways: 1) it goes exactly like Marc Merrill says in his tweet and we get the next generation of MMO around 2030; or 2) Marc Merrill gives another announcement in a couple years that the Riot MMO is cancelled. This would not be the first time something like this has happened for major AAA Publisher – just this year Blizzard cancelled their “unannounced” survival game after several years of development.
All that being said, there are a couple of silver linings that can be taken from this announcement. First, if any publisher other than Riot made this type of announcement, it would probably just mean the game is cancelled. It is believable that Riot Games will not give up on their MMO, which cannot be said for many other AAA publishers. Second, this Riot MMO strives to set break into next generation MMOs – they want to create an MMO like no other on the market right now. It very well may take Riot Games another several years to develop something as groundbreaking as announced. So until fans get the next announcement from Marc Merrill about this MMO, no one will know what to expect from this Riot MMO. Based on the postponement of the Riot MMO, one thing is certain. The hype for the MMO has died out significantly – out of sight, out of mind, and the Riot MMO is both out of sight and mind now. What was once the most anticipated game of 2025 is now just a game that is supposed to come out in the distant future, but even that may not be true as it could be canceled between now and that distant future. No one is waiting with bated breath for this Riot MMO now, and unfortunately, no one will be surprised if the next announcement about it is the news of the cancellation.
