By Riot Games brought its “League of Legends” gaming franchise to a whole new audience with their animated series “Arcane,” the highly acclaimed Netflix series that came in at a cost of $250 million for both seasons – making it the most expensive animated TV series ever made.
A new report at Bloomberg (via Dexerto and The Gamer) has gone into detail about those costs and suggests that the title was financial misfire for the company.
The series was designed with fans in mind and self-financed to ensure its quality, which did result in some widely lauded seasons and an Emmy win – even as a small amount of fan backlash emerged over a second season perceived as ‘rushed’.
However the report indicates they went way over budget as Riot invested in marketing and award campaigns on top of the production and development costs.
The report states: “Riot spent so much of its own money developing and marketing the show that it didn’t make money from the production.”
Riot was apparently hoping to justify the costly outlay by having the show drive non-players into joining the game itself and thus support its own core business – something that reportedly didn’t really happen as while it did result in new game sign-ups, few of those stuck around.
Both Netflix and China’s Tencent each paid $3 million per episode to distribute the series, covering not even half of that $250 million outlay. Game producer Paul Bellezza also says they were “really surprised with the success of season one” and thus missed out on opportunities to do in-game activations.
A Riot spokesperson tells the outlet that “Arcane was a success when we look across all our internal measures” with the second season “on track to be at least break-even for us financially.”
Even so, the report suggests that Riot is showing signs of moving away from Hollywood plans to renew focus on its core game properties.
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