Riot MMO's future is 'incredibly bright' despite co-founder likening its development to the grail: 'Many a brave knight are going to die'

Despite a cloud of doom and gloom hanging over Riot’s mysterious MMO in the wake of 2XKO’s closure–including well-founded concerns from our own Harvey Randall—its co-founder seems confident in its ongoing development. At least, that’s what I’m parsing from his relative non-answer when pressed about it during a panel at PAX West over the weekend.

Marc Merrill dropped a mention of the MMO while answering a different question during the panel, which was immediately chased up by host Greg Miller with half-joking prompts for further morsels of information. Merrill mostly laughs it off, but does give a somewhat half-answer that at least indicates development of it is moving along at… some sort of pace. Though Merrill’s description of creating an MMO makes it seem like it’s giving Riot a bit of a hard time.

Storytime w/ Marc Merrill | PAX West 2026 – YouTube

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“We know what players’ hopes and dreams are,” he said. “And it’s on us as a team—can we exceed in the execution, you know? But what a worthy quest. We jokingly call it ‘the grail’ internally because we’re like ‘Fuck it, you know, many a brave knight are going to die on the grail quest. But fuck it, it’s the grail, so let’s go.’ That’s the mindset that we really try to cultivate and that is incredibly hard to do at scale. But I think we’re doing a reasonable job and I think the future’s incredibly bright.”