Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Riot scrapped $1 million in outsourced backend tech to restart from scratch

Marc Merrill · Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill · Dec 14, 2020 · at 51:42

Marc Merrill is the co-founder of Riot Games. He discusses an early operational crisis in 2008 where third-party infrastructure for League of Legends proved unusable.

0:00 / 0:09exact quote · 9.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Marc Merrill

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…”
Marc Merrill Dec 14, 2020 ▶ 56:08 Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill
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…”
Marc Merrill Dec 14, 2020 ▶ 11:57 Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill
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…”
Marc Merrill Dec 14, 2020 ▶ 23:11 Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill
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…”
Marc Merrill Dec 14, 2020 ▶ 36:41 Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill
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…”
Marc Merrill Dec 14, 2020 ▶ 1:01:45 Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill
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.”
Marc Merrill Dec 14, 2020 ▶ 1:05:37 Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 800 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.