Rise and fallįive years after the release of Overwatch, it's obvious that Blizzard has struggled to balance the creation of new games with the demands of maintaining its existing ones, either through failures of its own leadership or the looming influence of Activision pushing for nonstop profit. Sure, there are Warcraft and StarCraft comics and novels, but that sort of deep cut lore material often appeals to a smaller nucleus of hardcore fans, while a show like Arcane can bring in legions of new ones. How did Blizzard's leadership never expand on that pedigree in meaningful ways?Įven with Overwatch, Blizzard stuck to the conservative playbook of making short promotional films about the characters, frustrating fans who wanted to see far more of that universe. Blizzard's fans have salivated over its game cinematics for years, as far back as StarCraft and Warcraft 3. The creativity and quality of Riot's expansion really highlights how stagnant Blizzard has been in the past few years.īack in 2016, we found watching Blizzard's big stab at multimedia, the Warcraft movie, an act of " fascinated embarrassment." Riot, with no deeper experience in animation, spent years building up the team to create an amazing TV show. Arcane enriches League of Legends, and we've probably barely begun to feel the ripple effects of its success (its characters have already started to become far more popular in-game). We love Runeterra even if it isn't wildly popular. The real surprise is just how consistently good Riot's expanded universe has been. Now with Arcane, Ruined King, and more planned League of Legends spin-offs on the way, Riot is building up an empire around its capital city. While Riot likes to say that it's mostly interested in doing its own thing in each of these genres, it's still competing against Blizzard and Valve, the most established names in PC gaming, and dethroning a game as popular as Hearthstone or CS:GO would be a seismic shift. Runeterra is also a blatant Hearthstone competitor.
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