Riot Games Chief Marc Merrill Says Arguments Over Arcane’s Huge Budget Are ‘Silly’

Ongoing arguments over Arcane’s huge budget are “silly,” the co-founder of Riot games has said amid the League of Legends animated series’ second and final season.

While Arcane has been a massive hit for Netflix and Riot Games — an unabashed critical darling that’s been embraced by League of Legends fans and otherwise — it didn’t come cheap. Earlier this month Variety reported it cost an eye-watering $250 million to make and market Arcane’s two seasons, for a total of 18 episodes.

That figure undoubtedly makes Arcane the most expensive animated series of all time by a longshot, but it is also vociferously debated, with many pointing out that Arcane is cheap in cost-per-minute terms compared to animated feature films from the likes of Pixar.

Riot co-founder and chief product officer Marc Merrill has stepped in with comments of his own on Reddit, insisting Arcane “was always written to be two seasons.”

That’s a nod to Riot’s initial plan for Arcane to have two seasons only (“the confusion is because internally there was a budget conversation about ‘approving five seasons’ — which simply means we were setting aside a bunch of money for lots of development and is completely irrelevant to the Arcane creative”).

But Merrill also addressed that massive budget: “the ‘lol at the cost’ of Arcane arguments are silly from our perspective as people have correctly pointed out the cost per minute of Arcane is about 1/3 to 1/4 of what Illumination/Pixar films cost.

“The market for this (‘high quality adult focused animation’) didn’t exist before Arcane so Hollywood has a hard time getting their head around why we would do this.”

In a subsequent post, Merrill defended Riot’s strategy, insisting all of Arcane’s massive budget goes to talent. That includes animators, concept artists, voice actors, sound designers, story boarders, composers, and other creatives.

The character animation alone makes up about 80% of the budget, Merrill revealed, “because we hand animate every frame to hit this type of quality.”

“Anyone complaining about the development budget being high is actually complaining about us paying talent, and complaining about us putting art first,” he continued. “Arcane is a great thing for every person working in animation as it helps point towards the value of higher budgets.”

In the Variety article, Merrill declined to confirm the $250 million number, but stood by the results. “We’re more than comfortable with the spend it took to deliver a show that was worthy of our players’ time,” he said.

The report had a couple of other interesting tidbits as well, including the fact that Riot had apparently recruited Marvel mainstays Joe and Anthony Russo to develop a feature film set in the League of Legends universe. However, Riot’s inexperience in Hollywood dealmaking — a crux of the article — led to the developer losing $5 million only for the Russos to walk away due to disagreements over the script. That’s an expensive creative difference.

As for what’s next for League of Legends animations, Arcane co-creator Christian Linke has teased that the team had plotted other stories set in Runeterra. Merrill also addressed this, confirming that while it is Riot’s intent to expand the universe, nothing is confirmed yet.

“Just because that is our intent, doesn’t mean it’s easy or that we can pump these things out like a factory – just like making games that are worthy of players time / love is really hard, so too is telling great stories and making incredible shows / films (especially when we are building it from scratch for the first time),” he said.

Arcane Season 2 comes to an end with Act 3 on November 23.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.