Arcane season 2
Arcane is universally recognized as one of the best shows to ever air on Netflix with sky-high critic and audience scores across both of its seasons. But in terms of dollars and cents, new reporting says that the enormously pricey show was not exactly raking in cash for Riot Games, and may have lost them a bit. Luckily for Riot, leadership does not seem to care.
Reporting from Bloomberg details the sky-high cost, $250 million, and how that did not exactly work out, given that Netflix paid them $3 million an episode to air it, and paid Riot’s parent company Tencent another $3 million an episode for it to come to China. Added up, that’s about half the cost of production. Riot, however, says that it increased business in other ways and will “at least break-even.”
The report also says some employees did not love the idea of sinking resources into Arcane, especially when Riot laid off 11% of its staff.
“Arcane’s very existence was controversial among some employees. Some Riot employees resisted the mandate to funnel resources into the show, according to six current and former staffers. The pricey passion project, backed by former Chief Executive Officer Nicolo Laurent, sapped precious resources from League of Legends, Riot’s most important business.”
The report says that the lack of revenue “paused” production on other shows, but in the wake of Arcane season 2 there were notable quotes from the show’s creator, Christian Linke, that they were heading to other regions and other characters for future series. There’s no word on how costs may come down to make that happen, if they ever do.
Arcane
In the wake of all this reporting, Riot co-founder Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill made a reddit post saying that it was “cynical” to review Arcane through this financial lens.
“These people think we make things like Arcane to sell skins, when in reality we sell skins to make things like Arcane…Do we get everything right? Nope, but we are not focused on the short term extraction of profits – we are focused on delivering exceptional value to our audience over the long term, again and again and again. To be clear, Arcane crushed it for players and so it crushed it for us.”
It’s a noble philosophy, but when you are owned by a technology giant like Tencent, it’s impossible to imagine there are not financial pressures there on projects like this, which is what the original report says. And “selling skins to make Arcane” is essentially the definition of taking away from the core business of League of Legends if that’s where game revenue is heading.
There’s a running joke among Arcane fans that if players were interested in the world, if they hopped into the often impenetrable League of Legends they would bounce right off, and the original report said Arcane did in fact not add many new players. Though League of Legends does remain one of the largest games in the world.
Fans of the game and show, of course, do not care. If Riot wants to spend hundreds of millions on shows as good as Arcane, that’s a win for the audience, and at least according to Riot leadership, a win for them, if people like it and their universe continues to expand. But in any case, it is going to be years until this theory is tested again with a new series, if one does come to fruition.
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