On 17 December 2020, Greg Street answered a question on Twitter about the "massive" project he was leading at Riot with three words: "It is an MMO." That sentence is the reason this site exists. Two years and three months later, Street left Riot. Two years after that, the MMO he founded to replace it closed its studio without shipping.
Street is the most famous person ever attached to the Riot MMO and the one with the least to do with the game being built now. Both facts matter, and his path through three companies explains a lot about why the project looks the way it does.
Before Riot
Street has a doctorate in marine biology, which is where the name comes from: a ghost crab, chosen for a forum handle that later became a brand. He left science for Ensemble Studios and the Age of Empires series, then joined Blizzard in 2008 as lead systems designer on World of Warcraft.
At Blizzard he became something rarer than a designer: a public one. His forum posts, the "blue posts" of the Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm years, explained design decisions to players in a register nobody at that scale had used before, candid and argumentative and frequently unpopular. He left in 2013 with a reputation for saying what the studio was thinking, which was exactly why Riot, then a company that talked to its players more than most, wanted him.
At Riot
Street joined Riot in late 2013 as lead game designer on League of Legends and rose through design to run the company's intellectual property and entertainment work, the division that produced Arcane and the unified lore. By 2020 he was a vice president, and the MMO was his: he announced it, recruited for it, and spent 2021 and 2022 describing it in the broad strokes that still dominate every "what we know" article.
His description is worth recalling because all of it predates the reset. A very large open world. Action combat. A game that respects the player's time and asks less of it than the genre usually does. Dungeons, raids, and bosses players would recognise. Mark "Scruffy" Yetter, League's gameplay design director, moved over to be his game director in 2021. We keep the list of those promises, and our estimate of which survived, in what is left of the 2021 vision.
In March 2023, after nine years, Street left. His public reason was that it was "time for something new". The project passed to its technical director in the interim and, a year later, to a reset that judged the first vision not different enough to ship. Whether that judgement was of Street's design or of what came after him has never been said.
Ghost
In November 2023 Street announced Fantastic Pixel Castle, an all-remote studio funded by NetEase, making a "modernised fantasy MMORPG" in a new setting, codenamed Ghost. The pitch was the same as the one he had made at Riot, minus the licence: an MMO for people who have less time than they did in 2004.
NetEase's appetite for Western studios cooled through 2025, and the company withdrew its funding. Street said in the autumn that the studio would "likely close" without a new publisher, and on 17 November 2025 it did. Ghost never showed a public build. Among the people who had joined him there was Brian Holinka, who had run World of Warcraft's PvP and combat; six months after the closure, Holinka was at Riot, on the MMO Street had left.
What his path says about the game
Three things.
The founder's departure was the beginning of the reset, not a separate event. Riot lost its most experienced MMO designer in March 2023 and, within a year, restarted the design. The two are not proved to be connected. They are hard to read any other way.
The 2021 promises were his. "Respects the player's time" was Street's principle at Riot and Street's pitch at Fantastic Pixel Castle. It is not obviously Riot's principle, and the reset post does not mention it. The question of whether it survived him is open, and it is the most important open question about the design.
The genre is as hard as he said. Street spent 2021 explaining why MMOs take so long and cost so much; Ghost then demonstrated it, dying for lack of a publisher before it could show anything. That is context for Riot's silence and for its willingness to spend up to $500 million on a rival, the episode in when Riot offered up to $500 million for Ashes of Creation.
What Street is to the project now
Nothing official, and a great deal by association. Because his name is the one most people attach to the Riot MMO, the death of Ghost read to many as the death of this game, and we deal with that confusion in is the Riot MMO cancelled?. The people building it today are listed in the WoW all-star team, and none of them reports to him.
What he leaves is the sentence, and the sentence still stands. It is an MMO.