I have no idea why a sidescroller fighting game would succeed or fail. Or what Riot is doing these days. Anyone actually play League of Legends here?
The IP is one of those rare fence-sitters between woke and independent because it has US developers but Chinese (Tencent) funding. This is probably why their Netflix TV show Arcane has a bunch of lesbians and black people, but also has a waifu heavily inspired by Harley Quinn (Jynx). So I don't know if this one cleanly breaks down into "go woke go broke".
edit: let's not forget that Riot's weirdly amazingly popular foray into kpop (KDA) has four obviously sexy women. Riot is such a weird company
I haven't played the League 'main game', which is a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), in ages, but used to, but a TL;DR is that for the past few years, Tencent has been trying to make the League of Legends a multimedia franchise among the likes of Marvel, DC, etc, with a digital trading card game (which died because it was actually TOO F2P, to where the incentives of players to pay for premium currency wasn't there), and have an action RPG, multiple shows other than Arcane planned, a MMO (allegedly, I think it's dead) and had a platform fighter (think Smash) planned but scrapped it after the death of Multiversus.
Riot's so into the kpop stuff because by far the largest playerbase for the main game is South Korea, followed by China. The members of K/DA are skins of characters who have their own lore, and a large number of skins for League of Legends characters are of them in alternate universes, like there's a whole magical girl line of skins named "Star Guardian", with its own setting and everything, just as one example.
Honestly League kind of went off the rails as soon as they focused on DIEversifying the cast. There was a time when all of the characters were (more or less) White/Asian, and straight (or at least, not-sexualized).
The devs are desperate to try to turn it gayer, and management is probably just trying to get them to make sexy kpop-girl skins.
I have no idea why a sidescroller fighting game would succeed or fail. Or what Riot is doing these days. Anyone actually play League of Legends here?
The IP is one of those rare fence-sitters between woke and independent because it has US developers but Chinese (Tencent) funding. This is probably why their Netflix TV show Arcane has a bunch of lesbians and black people, but also has a waifu heavily inspired by Harley Quinn (Jynx). So I don't know if this one cleanly breaks down into "go woke go broke".
edit: let's not forget that Riot's weirdly amazingly popular foray into kpop (KDA) has four obviously sexy women. Riot is such a weird company
I haven't played the League 'main game', which is a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), in ages, but used to, but a TL;DR is that for the past few years, Tencent has been trying to make the League of Legends a multimedia franchise among the likes of Marvel, DC, etc, with a digital trading card game (which died because it was actually TOO F2P, to where the incentives of players to pay for premium currency wasn't there), and have an action RPG, multiple shows other than Arcane planned, a MMO (allegedly, I think it's dead) and had a platform fighter (think Smash) planned but scrapped it after the death of Multiversus.
Riot's so into the kpop stuff because by far the largest playerbase for the main game is South Korea, followed by China. The members of K/DA are skins of characters who have their own lore, and a large number of skins for League of Legends characters are of them in alternate universes, like there's a whole magical girl line of skins named "Star Guardian", with its own setting and everything, just as one example.
Honestly League kind of went off the rails as soon as they focused on DIEversifying the cast. There was a time when all of the characters were (more or less) White/Asian, and straight (or at least, not-sexualized).
The devs are desperate to try to turn it gayer, and management is probably just trying to get them to make sexy kpop-girl skins.