Whether you’re interested in League of Legends or not, it’s demanding to deny the impact Arcane – an animated series inspired by the game’s world and characters – has had on the streaming world.
Arcane was once called the most high-priced animated series of all time, with its two seasons costing over $250 million to produce and sell. If this number seems massive, that’s because it is. What’s more, however, this is significantly more than the amount that everyone involved paid Riot.
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This is because Riot reportedly spent a lot of its own money on the actual production of the series, according to a up-to-date source Bloomberg report, production was over budget. While some rumors suggest that several seasons were in the works, the reality is that Arcane’s second season will be its last, and that likely has a lot to do with production costs.
The budget news is particularly brutal considering Netflix paid Riot around $3 million per episode and parent company Tencent paid $3 million to air the show in China. In total, this is less than half of the total program cost.
The report also found that while Riot had ambitious plans to transform itself into a media giant with Arcane, the studio did not have a solid plan to recover the costs of the program before it aired. A Riot spokesperson confirmed to Bloomberg that Arcane wasn’t profitable per se, but it helped the business in other ways. They also said that the second season “is on track to be at least break-even for us financially.”
Please note that unlike most projects of this type, Arcane was funded, developed and produced by Riot. The studio wanted full control over the intellectual property and production, so it did not take advantage of the easier (and more lucrative) licensing model. This makes Riot’s decision to halt other entertainment projects in development and discontinue work on Arcane itself make sense.
More fascinating than the numbers themselves, Arcane reportedly failed to attract enough up-to-date players to League of Legends or convince existing players to spend more on the game. This was partly due to the narrow window the show’s creators gave Riot’s designers to create in-game skins and themed events around it (a problem the studio solved in season two), but it also has a lot to do with the sophisticated nature of the game, which scared off many up-to-date players , who signed up after the first season broke out.
For now, it doesn’t look like Arcane will be followed by any other series inspired by the world of League of Legends.
