For a decade now, Riot Games has been known almost exclusively for , the ultra-successful MOBA that can still attract 8 million simultaneous players at its daily peak. But in an anniversary livestream tonight, the company confirmed a veritable smorgasbord of new gaming and entertainment projects for the first time, all set in the same universe.
Those projects include:
Further Reading
The rapid project expansion, after a full decade of existence as a de facto single-game company puts the Tencent-owned conglomerate and its 2,500 employees immediately in a class with multi-franchise publishing behemoths like Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft. Unlike those companies, though, Riot is currently focusing all of its efforts on games in a single shared universe, building on ten years of lore and character design as it attempts to rapidly expand to other popular genres.
“We have the benefit of being able to be long term,” Riot Games Co-founder Marc Merrill told The Washington Post about the long wait for further games from the company. “We don’t have to go push out a product to meet some quarterly deadline or revenue target or whatnot.”
Riot’s expansion comes as the company continues to recover from widespread accusations of sexual harassment first published by Kotaku last September. A a number of class-action lawsuits that stemmed from those allegations were settled in August, and Riot said in a blog post at the time that “we can confidently state that gender discrimination (in pay or promotion), sexual harassment, and retaliation are not systemic issues at Riot.”
