Riot Games

Riot Games is an American video game company founded in Los Angeles in 2006 by Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill. Its first game, League of Legends, launched for Microsoft Windows in October 2009. Inspired by the multiplayer online battle arena format popularized by the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, League of Legends became Riot’s defining product and has remained the center of a large competitive and media ecosystem. Tencent acquired a majority stake in Riot Games in 2011 and completed its acquisition of the company in 2015. Riot has continued to operate under its own name while expanding League of Legends across game development, esports, music, animation, and publishing. The company operates League Championship Series competition in North America and regional leagues elsewhere, while its annual League of Legends World Championship is among the most prominent events in esports. In 2023, the World Championship was held in South Korea and concluded at Seoul’s Gocheok Sky Dome. Riot broadened its catalogue significantly in 2020. Valorant, a free-to-play tactical first-person shooter, entered closed beta in April and released in June. Its gameplay centers on five-player teams, gunplay, and agents with distinct abilities. Riot also released Legends of Runeterra, a digital collectible card game set in the same fictional world as League of Legends, and began releasing League of Legends: Wild Rift, a mobile and console-oriented version of League. Teamfight Tactics, an auto battler originally introduced as a League mode in 2019, became another standalone Riot game. The company created Riot Forge to publish externally developed single-player games set in Runeterra. Released titles included Ruined King: A League of Legends Story, developed by Airship Syndicate; Hextech Mayhem, by Choice Provisions; Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story, by Tequila Works; and The Mageseeker, by Digital Sun. Riot’s most visible expansion beyond games has been Arcane, the animated series produced with French studio Fortiche Production. The first season premiered on Netflix in November 2021 and follows Vi, Jinx, Jayce, Viktor, and the opposing cities of Piltover and Zaun. Arcane won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program in 2022, becoming the first streaming series to win that category. Riot’s music projects have also included the virtual group K/DA, whose 2018 song “POP/STARS” was introduced at the League of Legends World Championship opening ceremony.