Interview: Riot Games still wants to make an MMO (and just a few other things)

Plus: The head of Virtuos has a Hollywood-style fix for an ailing games industry. And, yes, it involves expanding companies like his.

Riot’s Marc Merrill at the 2025 DICE Summit. Photo: AIAS/Kinser Studios.

Ever so briefly, on stage at the DICE convention in Las Vegas last week, Riot Games co-founder and chief product officer Marc Merrill uttered the letters M-M-O.

His talk, geared toward an audience of the game industry’s business and creative elite, was about the success that comes with focusing on an audience’s needs—about Riot nailing that with League of Legends, missing it with a project called Riot Forge, and, in the future, by “finding ways to add value to the [fighting game community] or even perhaps to the MMO community.”

He’d spent some time during his talk promoting Riot’s hopes for 2XKO, the company’s long-in-development upcoming fighting game.

But for anyone wanting to know what was up with Riot’s foray into massively multiplayer online gaming, or wondering why Riot is still trying to climb such a steep mountain off of which so many would-be World of Warcraft competitors have tumbled, that “perhaps” was it.

I needed to know more.

Merrill had been in Vegas for a couple of days, meeting with peers at DICE, where gaming’s captains of industry gather. He had even played a Scooby Doo-themed round of Dungeons & Dragons the day before his talk with other gaming execs (he played as Fred).

Merrill and I had been booked, last minute, for a brief interview. After the talk, he’d grabbed his suitcase and wheeled it toward the DICE press room, a quiet hallway in the Aria, the Vegas Strip hotel where DICE was held.

We chatted about Riot’s headcount (still up from five years ago despite big cuts last year), League of Legends’ incumbency and a number of things Riot was and wasn’t doing. The MMO was in the former category.

I wanted to be sure: An MMO was still worth pursuing?

“Oh yeah,” he said. “And it's probably the project I personally spend the most time on as well.”

Why, I asked, do you still believe in it?