Assertion Not checkable as stated
Riot hired 1,100 Filipino players to secretly beta test League of Legends
“One of the solutions that the team came up with was we ended up hiring 1100 people in the Philippines to go play the game, because we knew that if Western audiences participated in a beta with a game of this quality at this point in time, it could, you know, e…”
Insight
Merrill: Building an online multiplayer game is like building a rocket ship
“The ability to build an online game is, is kind of like building a rocket ship where you have to build a game engine and a massive tool pipeline to put assets into the game. You know, you have to be able to build a whole set of server technologies that can sca…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Merrill: Incumbent publishers said Riot's free-to-play model would never work
“And once we started talking to publishers, you know, whose entire incumbency and multi, you know, massive multi-dollar billion dollar businesses were built around selling shiny discs at retail, they Told us that this was a horrible idea, and it would never wor…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Riot's early lead developer held secret pitch meetings with Sony and Microsoft
“So that was a really contentious moment in, in the office where it turned out that we heard that this individual was having meetings with, you know, Sony and Microsoft to try to go build games for, you know, the PlayStation network or the burgeoning Xbox marke…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Merrill: Western Free-To-Play Games Had Heavy Low-Quality Stigma in 2009
“There was A lot of stigma where any free game that existed in the West at the time was generally like a really low production value, sort of like mini game. And so we really thought it was critical to have the main gaming review sites like PC Gamer play the ga…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Merrill: Riot had highest burn rate among their VCs' portfolio companies
“Our burn rate, which was the highest burn rate of any company in any of our VCs portfolio started to trend down, you know, a little bit just month over month.”
Opinion
Merrill: Riot erred by replacing crowdsourced moderation with top-down policing
“We made a mistake when we were investing in building out our player behavior team to try to nurture, you know, a really positive community, and promote sportsmanship, and train people how to be better online, where we moved from sort of a crowdsource self-poli…”
Assertion Supported
All growth since Riot's 2011 acquisition has been self-funded and profitable
“In a hundred percent of our growth since that 2011 transaction is organic, right? Like riots never taken on or capitalized the business at all. It's, you know, so like, it's been a sort of, since that period of time, a very profitable. You know, business, but …”
Assertion Supported
Riot hired DotA designer Steve Feek while he worked at Best Buy
“We brought him on to the company, I think in either December, six or January, seven, but he was working at Best Buy in Wisconsin and was in college studying computer science.”
Disclosure
Merrill: Riot pitched gaming's shift from packaged goods to direct-to-consumer
“We tended to not focus much on the actual details of the game, but much more on the business opportunity and sort of the transition that we saw where the game industry would be, would evolve from a sort of packaged goods model to a direct to consumer model.”
Assertion Supported
Merrill: Free-to-play was already succeeding in Korea and China by 2006
“The free to play business model was already having success in Korea in particular, and then starting to have some success in China.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Riot scrapped $1 million in outsourced backend tech to restart from scratch
“We then had to call our board and tell them, Hey guys, you know, that back in technology we were building and the million dollars we spent on this, we're literally going to have to throw it all away and start over from scratch.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Merrill: Riot's $7M Series A required 1,000-player beta milestone
“So that's because our venture raise, our first series A financing was actually tranched. So we got three and a half of the seven million dollars. And in order to unlock the second three and a half million, we needed to successfully run a beta test with a thous…”
Disclosure
Riot timed League of Legends Season 1 just ahead of StarCraft II
“We were terrified of Starcraft two. And so we actually timed our season one competitive update two weeks before they launched.”
Disclosure
Merrill: Riot originally viewed esports as an engagement feature, not revenue
“Yeah, we didn't look at it as a revenue stream, especially early on. We looked at it as sort of a feature- That would help drive engagement and just be a value added experience for the community for just something cool to watch.”
Assertion Supported
Merrill: Riot co-founders surrendered majority control before 2011 Tencent acquisition
“Brandon and I didn't control the company at the time. Because we had to raise so much capital prior to launch that we gave up a majority of the equity.”
Disclosure
Merrill: Scaling Crises and Governance Exhaustion Led Riot Founders to Step Down
“And like part of the reason Brandon and I stepped down was because we needed to also make it sustainable. Like we were exhausted from running this place for, you know, with so many crises, every step of the way. And when we're, as the company really grew and c…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Riot's initial financial model required just 20,000 simultaneous players to break even
“Our first financial model that we built assumed that we would hit 20,000 or like our basic scenario was 20,000 simultaneous players. And if we did that, we hoped we could break even and have a business”
