A game run like a long relationship
Riot Games starts from a complaint about how games were made. Its co-founders, Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill, met at the University of Southern California, shared a place after college and founded Riot in 2006 in their Los Angeles apartment. Riot's own account says they set out to build a company that would redefine how games are developed, delivered and supported for players. In practice that meant one game, League of Legends, released in 2009, free to play and updated for years instead of being replaced by a sequel. Riot's 2026 job postings still open with that history and say more than 100 million people play League every month.
These people think we make things like Arcane to sell skins, when in reality we sell skins to make things like Arcane.
Marc Merrill · Co-Founder, Co-Chairman and Chief Product Officer · Reddit reply to reports on Arcane's cost, as quoted by 80 Level · 2024-12-25
The belief behind it is that a player's relationship with a game should be measured in years. Riot's published values say so directly: its commitment to players is measured in years and decades, not days or weeks, and company dollars should be treated as player dollars. Merrill made the money side of that belief explicit in December 2024, after a report that the two seasons of Arcane had cost about $250 million. Riot does not make shows to sell skins, he wrote; it sells skins to make things like Arcane. That is the model in one line. The game is free, players pay for optional items, and the margin funds esports, music, animation and new games set in the same world.
Why the model keeps changing
Why now is a story in three stages. Free online play let League grow fast: Riot reported 32 million monthly players in October 2012, 67 million in January 2014 and more than 100 million in September 2016. From 2019 Riot widened the bet, announcing Legends of Runeterra, Teamfight Tactics for mobile, VALORANT and the animated series Arcane in October 2019. By January 2024 CEO Dylan Jadeja wrote that Riot had doubled in size in a few years, had costs it could not sustain and lacked focus. It cut about 530 roles, around 11 percent of the workforce.
Today, we're a company without a sharp enough focus, and simply put, we have too many things underway.
Dylan Jadeja · Chief Executive Officer · Letter to Rioters announcing about 530 job cuts, published on riotgames.com · 2024-01-22
The third stage is under way in 2026. On 20 August Riot told players that active development of its fighting game 2XKO will end in December because it costs substantially more to run than it brings in. On 18 September it launched Riftbound, a physical trading card game set in League's world, in Korea. Both moves follow the same rule: keep investing in what players stay with, and stop what they do not.
One evening of League in Korea
Take an illustrative player in Seoul. She logs into League at a PC bang after work. The game costs her nothing, but the PC bang pays Riot Games Korea for the time she plays: Riot Korea bills PC bangs by play time and stores each hour as a session record, about 4 billion a year by 2023. If she buys a skin or an esports item, part of that esports digital revenue goes into a pool that Riot shares with LCK teams. Later she watches an LCK match broadcast from LoL Park in Jongno, and at the weekend she may sit down at a card store for a Riftbound Nexus Night. People make the calls that matter at each step: which items to release, how a league pays its teams, which stores get stock first.
Riot's player numbers are its own, and the biggest dated ones are a decade old. The series runs from 32 million monthly players in 2012 to more than 100 million in 2016, and the 2026 postings repeat the more than 100 million line. Treat it as Riot's description, and ask in an interview how the team you would join measures players today.
The 7 open Korea roles sit at three points on that evening: Riftbound in stores and PC bangs, esports partners and live events, and the platform and finance systems behind the Korea publisher. In each, the job is to keep a long-running player relationship working in Korea, not to launch something and move on.
