Riot MMO timeline: every dated event, 2016 to 2026

Thirty-one dated events in ten years, of which Riot Games itself announced eleven. The rest reached the public through a developer's own post, a journalist's report, or a leak. Each line below says which, because on a project that has shown nothing, the provenance of a fact is most of its value.

Status labels: confirmed means Riot or the person concerned said it; reported means reliable press, not denied; rumour means a single or anonymous source. Where an event belongs to the wider company rather than the MMO, it is here because it changed the MMO's odds.

2016 to 2019: before the name

Around 2016. Early research and development on a League MMO begins inside Riot, according to later reporting. Reported.

October 2019. Riot's tenth-anniversary broadcast teases an MMO among a slate of new projects. No name, no footage. Confirmed.

2020: the announcement

17 December 2020. Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, a Riot vice president and formerly World of Warcraft's lead systems designer, confirms that Riot is developing an MMO set in Runeterra. Riot opens a recruiting page for the project the same week, asking for people with MMO experience in gameplay engineering, design, UX, art and production. Confirmed.

2021 to 2022: the first vision

Street describes the intended game in interviews and developer posts: a "very large" open world, action combat without tab-targeting, a third-person camera, a persistent sandbox world, free-to-play with cosmetics, and a design that respects the player's time. Dungeons, raids, housing, transmogrification and fishing all come up. Confirmed at the time; all of it predates the reset and none has been repeated since.

April to June 2021. Mark "Scruffy" Yetter, League of Legends' gameplay design director for more than eight years, moves to the MMO as its game director. Confirmed. His role after the 2024 reset has never been clarified.

The streamer Asmongold cites 138 million views for the MMO announcement video within seven months, against about two million for the announcement of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight. Reported by Sportskeeda; not a Riot figure.

December 2022. Riot's chief financial officer, Mark Sottosanti, writes to the management of Intrepid Studios, developer of Ashes of Creation, proposing an acquisition. The figure later reported is $250 to $500 million. Reported, from documents published by Intrepid's chief executive; confirmed in outline by Merrill in April 2026.

2023: the founder leaves

Early 2023. Job listings mentioning "Project T", a separate Riot project described as an MMOFPS, are noticed on Discord. This is not the Runeterra MMO. Reported.

March 2023. Street leaves Riot after nine years, saying "it's time for something new". Confirmed.

13 October 2023. Riot unifies its Runeterra canon: Arcane, Legends of Runeterra and the MMO now share one continuity. Confirmed.

November 2023. Street announces Fantastic Pixel Castle, a NetEase-funded studio making an MMO codenamed Ghost, in a new setting. Confirmed.

2024: the reset

22 January 2024. Riot cuts 530 jobs, about eleven per cent of its staff, and closes Riot Forge, its publishing label for smaller Runeterra games. CEO Dylan Jadeja says the company has "too many things underway" and that some of its "big bets" since 2019 "aren't paying off". Confirmed.

March 2024. Marc Merrill announces that the MMO's direction was reset "some time ago", because the initial vision "just wasn't different enough from what you can play today". The team will go dark "likely for several years". Fabrice Condominas, formerly of BioWare and EA, is Executive Producer. Confirmed. The full statement is in the 2024 reset, explained.

November 2024. Merrill says the team "has a great direction now and is making a lot of momentum". Orlando Salvatore, formerly of Blizzard, is reported as the MMO's engineering manager. Confirmed and reported respectively.

2025: silence, and two departures nearby

December 2024. The MMO's technical director, Vijay Thakkar, leaves after eight years at Riot; his own post announces his last month. Confirmed, by Thakkar. The press notices in February 2025.

18 February 2025. At the DICE Summit, Merrill tells Game File that the MMO is "probably the project I personally spend the most time on". Confirmed.

June 2025. Riot cancels Hytale and closes Hypixel Studios, with about 150 people laid off. The intellectual property is later sold back to Hypixel's founder. Confirmed.

July 2025. New MMO job postings circulate. Reported.

29 July 2025. Valorant moves to Unreal Engine 5 with patch 11.02. Not the MMO, but the clearest sign of where Riot's Unreal stack sits. Confirmed.

26 August 2025. A closed playtest of Project T is said to take place. Rumour.

October 2025. Riot is reported to be recruiting MMO talent from Amazon Games' layoffs. Reported.

17 November 2025. Fantastic Pixel Castle closes after NetEase withdraws funding. Ghost is dead. Confirmed.

2026: the hires

15 January 2026. Raymond Bartos, formerly lead producer on World of Warcraft, joins as Senior Game Producer. Confirmed, by Bartos.

9 February 2026. Riot announces layoffs on the 2XKO team three weeks after that game's launch, citing momentum that "hasn't reached the level needed to support a team of this size". The figures, about 80 people and roughly half the team, plus about twelve publishing roles, are reported. Confirmed (the layoffs), reported (the numbers).

23 to 24 March 2026. The leaker @BigBadBear_ reports that Project T is being overhauled or cancelled, and that a "Genshin-like" open-world League game is in development. Headlines report the Riot MMO as cancelled. It is not: the leak concerned the Valorant-universe project. Rumour, and a separate game. The episode is in the March 2026 cancellation rumour, taken apart.

15 April 2026. Merrill confirms that Riot explored investing in or acquiring Intrepid Studios and decided not to proceed. Confirmed.

1 June 2026. Brian Holinka, World of Warcraft's former lead PvP designer and lead combat designer, joins as Principal Game Designer. Confirmed, by Holinka. What it implies is in what the Holinka hire tells us.

26 June 2026. Riot announces League of Legends Classic after datamined assets surface from the public test environment. It releases on 29 July 2026. Confirmed.

20 August 2026. Riot announces that 2XKO will move to maintenance mode in December 2026, with servers kept online. Confirmed.

Merrill says the MMO will ship "before 2030". Confirmed. The only date Riot has ever given; how to read it is in why "before 2030", and not sooner.

September 2026. No title, no screenshot, no gameplay, no leaked asset. Confirmed by absence.

Reading the list

Three shapes stand out. The project's public voice changed from a designer, Street, to an executive, Merrill, in 2023, and the volume of information dropped accordingly. Every senior departure has been followed by a senior hire, and the hires since 2024 all come from World of Warcraft; who they are and what they imply is in the WoW all-star team. And across a period in which Riot closed a label, cancelled a game, and halved a team three weeks after launch, the MMO was reset rather than cut. We think that last shape is the important one, and set out why in why the MMO survived Riot's purge.

For the same material organised by what is known rather than by date, see everything we actually know. This list grows when something happens; the date at the top of the page is the date it last did.