Riot Forge
video game publisher
Riot Forge was an American video game publishing label created by Riot Games, developers of the MOBA video game League of Legends. Its purpose was to fund various critically-acclaimed indie game studios to create spin-off games in the fictional universe of Runeterra, generally centered around one or more of the series' playable characters, or Champions. The label was initially created in 2019, and a number of games were published under it with generally positive critical reception.
Riot Forge was shut down five years later in January 2024, during the 2023–2024 video game industry layoffs prompted by a post-COVID-19 pandemic drop in video game demand. The shutdown of Riot Forge was bemoaned by critics, who praised the publishing label for supporting indie developers and allowing non-competitive players to become immersed in the series' lore. Critics of the shutdown attributed the disappointing sales of Riot Forge's games to the company's ineffective marketing strategy and limited consumer outreach, arguing that broader video gaming community was unaware the spin-off titles had been released.
History
The main League of Legends game was not seen as an effective vehicle for storytelling, leaving the lore of the series to be told in blurbs on the studio's website. This led to the creation of Riot Forge as one attempt to expand the series' mythos. The game making process was hands-off, and allowed studios to make a genre of game they would prefer, albeit one that would likely see commercial success. One main restriction was that the games had to be set in the standard Runeterra universe and not in any alternate ones depicted by the main game's themed player skins, such as K/DA or Star Guardians.
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This entry incorporates text from “Riot Forge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.