Popular gaming streamer Asmongold has taken a swing at Riot Games today for its reasons around its huge layoffs on Jan. 22, suggesting the company should be held far more accountable for the mistakes it made with Riot Forge.
Riot Forge was focused on creating Runeterra-based games alongside indie developers to bring the League of Legends universe to more players across different genres. Since its inception, the project released six titles, including Mageseeker, Ruined King, and most recently The Song of Nunu. While these were good games for the genre, nothing saw them stand out above the rest and—in Asmongold’s opinion, at least—their “unearned” hefty price tags led to their failure and then the eventual downsizing at Riot this month.
In a video on the topic on Jan. 24, the Twitch creator slammed Riot’s marketing and finance team for how they established the prices for these titles. He claimed they were “overpriced for what they were,” even if it was based around the League brand and the Runeterra universe, and that immediately set the project up for an inevitable failure.
On top of that, he continued, Riot failed to look at their biggest audience; Riot gamers are used to playing games with no price attached, as League, VALORANT, and TFT are free-to-play. This meant the core market Riot was trying to hit with its Forge releases had to be sold on forking out cash for similar titles—something the company’s marketing team did not do.
“The marketing department at Riot? Like, those are the people they should get rid of. The people who decided the financials for those games should not work in the company anymore,” the gaming streamer added.
Whatever happened behind the scenes, Riot did eventually decide to shut down Riot Forge, which means it can no longer find ways to fix its marketing and pricing issues or find ways to get more eyes on the game, like adding them to the League client similar to how Blizzard has all their titles in the Battle.net launcher.
The Riot downsizing also saw Legends of Runeterra scaled back drastically, though it has not yet been totally abandoned by the League and VALORANT developers.
