World of Warcraft launched on 23 November 2004. On 1 June 2026, the man who ran its combat design for the better part of a decade started work on the Riot MMO, joining a producer and an engineering manager from the same game. Riot is hiring the people who built the reference title to build something Marc Merrill has said must not resemble it.
That is the shape of the comparison people keep making, and it is worth making properly, because the popular version, Riot's money against Blizzard's twenty years, misses what each side is actually good at.
What World of Warcraft has
Twenty-two years of content. Every expansion since 2004 is still in the game in some form, and Classic servers, launched in 2019, serve the versions that were removed. No new MMO can ship with that much world, and none should try.
The most legible group combat in the genre. Tab-targeting is unfashionable and it is why forty people can fight one boss and understand what happened. Raid design is the discipline Blizzard invented, and the studio's encounter designers are, by common consent, the best there are.
A player base that has already decided it likes this. Blizzard has not published subscriber numbers since 2015, but the game remains the largest subscription MMO in the West by every external estimate, and its audience has proved willing to return for expansions and for its own past.
A parent with deep pockets. Microsoft completed its purchase of Activision Blizzard on 13 October 2023, which places World of Warcraft inside the company that also owns Xbox and Game Pass.
What World of Warcraft does not have
New players. The game's difficulty is not its systems but its history: a newcomer in 2026 arrives at a world with two decades of accumulated context, and the on-ramps Blizzard has built for that are a permanent work in progress.
Anyone under thirty, in numbers. This is the polite version of a point every analyst makes: the audience that grew up with World of Warcraft is the audience that still plays it.
The people Riot just hired. A lead combat designer, a lead producer and an engineering manager have left Blizzard's MMO for Riot's since 2024, and the movement has been one way.
What the Riot MMO has
The audience World of Warcraft lacks. Riot has said that more than a hundred million people play League of Legends in a month, most of them younger than the average MMO player and most of them never having played one. Riot does not need to win World of Warcraft's players. It needs to convert a fraction of its own, and the 138 million views that the streamer Asmongold attributed to the announcement video within seven months, a figure reported by Sportskeeda rather than by Riot, suggest the fraction is not small.
A world people already know how to look at. Arcane reached a mainstream audience no MMO has, and Legends of Runeterra left more than two thousand illustrations of the other regions. The art direction problem that consumes most MMOs' first years is, for Riot, a matter of choosing.
Free entry. Every Riot game is free to play and none has crossed into selling power. That reputation is an asset in a genre where players assume the opposite, and it removes the subscription barrier that keeps most of League's audience out of MMOs entirely. The reasoning is in will the Riot MMO be free-to-play?.
Fifteen years of balancing 170 characters in a skillshot game, on a patch cycle the rest of the industry copies. Riot's live-operations discipline is the best in competitive games. Whether it transfers to a persistent world is the open question, and it is the question Brian Holinka was hired to answer.
Money without a quarterly report. Riot is owned outright by Tencent and was prepared, in 2022, to spend up to $500 million on a rival MMO studio. The budget is not the constraint.
What the Riot MMO does not have
A game. Six years after the announcement there is no footage, no title and no date beyond "before 2030". Everything above is potential.
A design that anyone outside Riot has seen since the reset. The 2024 restart threw out a version that Merrill judged too close to existing MMOs, which is to say too close to World of Warcraft. The replacement has been described in exactly one phrase: "a significant evolution of the genre". We go through what that did to the earlier plans in the 2024 reset, explained.
Experience shipping a persistent world. Riot has run one of the largest online games in history, but a match-based game and a world are different engineering problems, and the company knows it: that is why the first World of Warcraft hire was an engineering manager.
Twenty years of content, and no way to buy them.
Why it is not a duel
The comparison assumes the two games compete for the same players. They mostly will not. World of Warcraft's audience is committed, older and subscribed; the Riot MMO's target is younger, free, and currently playing something else entirely. A successful Riot MMO would grow the genre more than it would shrink Blizzard's share of it, which is roughly what Valorant did to the tactical shooter.
The real contest is internal to Riot. The hires say the company wants World of Warcraft's competence; the reset says it does not want World of Warcraft's game. Holding both at once is the whole difficulty, and we set out how the combat question in particular might resolve in what the Holinka hire tells us.
Where this leaves the comparison
Blizzard has the game and the raid designers. Riot has the audience, the art, the money and, since June 2026, some of Blizzard's designers. The one thing neither side can buy is time, and here the advantage is all one way: World of Warcraft has spent twenty-two years learning what its players will tolerate, and the Riot MMO has spent six learning what it does not want to be.
For what has actually been confirmed on Riot's side, as opposed to compared, see everything we actually know about the Riot MMO.