Co-founder of Riot Games: the company is not very good at handling M&A
Riot Games struggles with integrating new teams into its structure, claims one of its founders, Marc Merrill. He made this admission on the Lemonade Stand podcast.
2XKO
During the conversation, Merrill referred to acquisitions as a complex endeavor. As an example, he cited the situation with Radiant Entertainment, which Riot Games acquired ten years ago.
"We acquired Radiant in 2016, when we started collaborating with the Cannon brothers [founders of the studio]. However, due to the leadership change at Riot Games and other circumstances, we lacked a unified strategy. This eventually led to a split among managers, resulting in the team being essentially left to its own devices, receiving different instructions from different people within the company," recalls Merrill.
According to Merrill, this is partly related to the issues with 2XKO — a fighting game set in the League of Legends universe by Radiant Entertainment, whose active support will end in December 2026. Due to the absence of a unified vision, the development was prolonged and ultimately cost a substantial amount. As the co-founder of Riot Games sees it, for the game to be financially justified, it required "hundreds of thousands, if not millions" of active users per month, but it did not attract that many.
Another example of Riot Games' unsuccessful M&A strategy named by Merrill is Hypixel Studios, behind the sandbox game Hytale. The company decided to close it five years after the acquisition. Fortunately, the studio managed to revive itself — it was bought back from Riot Games by the Hytale developers themselves.