Riot Games has been having a pretty rough time of things recently. The studio may have found incredible success with the MOBA genre and their hit League of Legends, but everything’s not perfect. There was a ton of backlash over alleged gender discrimination, and a “toxic bro culture”. Riot recently settled the resulting lawsuits, agreeing to pay out $10 million. Now though, the company is pushing forward and trying to look toward the future. And to aid in accomplishing their future goals, Riot has just announced a new multi-studio publishing arm that will work on a variety of new projects. This new publishing arm is called Riot Forge.
The new effort was announced ahead of this year’s Game Awards. This new group will publish not only Riot’s internal properties for League of Legends, but also projects from unnamed third-party developers. The efforts have been left pretty murky, seemingly on purpose. as Riot doesn’t want to reveal new projects before they’re ready.
Riot Forge will work with the rest of the studio on future games across more genres than MOBA. It has been confirmed that Riot Games has been working on at least two new titles. There are also vague allusions to some other genre entries with different studios. The titles teased include a new card game along the lines of Hearthstone, as well as new fighting games, and even an FPS. There are also some kind of RPG in the works.
Greg Street, who serves as vice president of IP and Entertainment for Riot Games, said that the staff are “really excited” to work on future projects, and that the new effort will involve “talented game studios around the world.” We will just have to wait and see what the future holds for Riot and the teams they work with as a part of Riot Forge.
