Marc Merrill is the co-founder of Riot Games. He discusses the stealth testing strategy used before launching League of Legends in 2009.
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…”
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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…”
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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…”
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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…”
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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…”