The March 2026 Riot MMO cancellation rumour, taken apart

Between the night of 23 March 2026 and the following morning, the Riot MMO was cancelled on social media, un-cancelled by lunchtime, and left, as it had been the day before, exactly where it was. Nothing about the Runeterra MMO changed. What changed was that a leak about a different Riot game reached readers with the wrong name attached.

The episode is worth a full account, partly because it will recur, and partly because how it happened says a lot about the vacuum this project lives in.

What was actually claimed

The source was the leaker who posts as @BigBadBear_, with a second account, SargeOP_, relaying similar claims the same night. The claims, as collected by Mein-MMO and MaxLevelGaming the following day, were three.

First, that Riot was "completely overhauling or possibly even cancelling" a project called Project T. Second, that Project T would be transformed into a "Genshin-like" open-world game with multiplayer elements, available on mobile. Third, that repeated layoffs had damaged the project's development and were the reason for the change.

None of these claims has been confirmed by Riot. None has been denied either, which is normal: Riot has not acknowledged Project T's existence in any official statement.

Which game Project T is

Project T is not the Runeterra MMO. It is a codename that surfaced in early 2023, when Discord users noticed Riot job listings describing a multiplayer first-person shooter with MMO features. Later listings, and a screenshot that leaked in 2024, placed it in the universe of Valorant, not as a sequel but as a separate game in that setting. The reporting has consistently described it as an extraction shooter or MMOFPS with seasons, weapon modification and player quarters, in the manner of Destiny 2, and its executive producer as Matt Zitterman, formerly production director on Destiny 2. A closed playtest was rumoured for 26 August 2025.

That is a different studio team, a different universe, a different genre and a different executive from the game this site follows. The Runeterra MMO is a fantasy MMORPG, set in the world of League of Legends, run by Fabrice Condominas under Marc Merrill. The two projects share a parent company and a letter of the alphabet. We explain the shooter properly in Project T, Riot's other MMO.

How the name crossed over

The mechanism was ordinary. Both projects are informally called "the Riot MMO" by people who follow only one of them. The leaker's post said "Project T", and a reader who has spent five years waiting for a Runeterra MMO, and has never heard of a Valorant shooter, reads "Riot's MMO project" and supplies the rest. By the time the claim was a headline, "Project T" had become "the Riot MMO", and "overhauling or possibly cancelling" had become "cancelled".

Mein-MMO's headline the next day put it precisely: the LoL MMORPG was supposed to be cancelled, but in reality Riot had only hidden another MMO from us. A commentator on X, Jay Oddity, summarised the correction the same morning: the Valorant project was the one in question, and "the League of Legends MMO is still ongoing and unaffected".

Within a week, the correction had circulated about as widely as the error. That is better than usual.

What the rumour got right, if anything

Possibly quite a lot, about the other game. A leak that Riot was reconsidering a Destiny-style shooter, after two years of layoffs that included half the 2XKO team, is plausible on its face, and the same leaker has a record on Riot's internal moves that the specialist press treats as worth reporting. We do not know whether Project T was cancelled. Riot has not said, and as of this article's date it still has not.

The claim about a "Genshin-like" League game is a separate rumour that arrived in the same post. It is a single-source claim about a third project, and we file it as such: unconfirmed, unrelated to the MMO as far as anyone has shown, and interesting mainly for what it would say about Riot's appetite for open worlds.

What it says about the vacuum

The reason a leak about one game can cancel another overnight is that the second game has given the public nothing to hold on to. Since March 2024, Riot's MMO has produced no images, no name, and four sentences of official comment. Into that space, anything with "Riot" and "MMO" in it will flow. Merrill asked for the silence on purpose, so that the team could work; the cost of it is that every quiet month is read as a symptom, and every adjacent rumour is read as the diagnosis. The general case is is the Riot MMO cancelled?, which answers the question with dated evidence rather than a mood.

How to read the next one

Two habits will catch most future versions of this.

Ask which project. Riot has at least two MMO-adjacent games in development and possibly a third, and a leak that does not name the setting is not a leak about the Runeterra MMO.

Grade the source. Leaker accounts are useful for direction and useless for confirmation; nothing they say becomes a fact until Riot, or a named developer, or a journalist with a record on the beat, says it too. Our own rule is that a rumour is published only as a rumour, with the account named and the date attached, which is why the line for this episode in the Riot MMO timeline carries that label and no other.