When Riot offered up to $500 million for Ashes of Creation

In December 2022, two years after announcing its own MMO, Riot Games tried to buy someone else's. The offer went to Intrepid Studios, the San Diego developer of Ashes of Creation, and the figure that later surfaced was between $250 and $500 million. Intrepid said no. The Runeterra MMO's founder left Riot three months later, and the project was reset within the year.

Nobody at Riot connected those events in public, and we cannot prove they are connected. But the offer is the only hard number ever attached to what Riot is willing to spend on an MMO, and its timing sits in the middle of the most turbulent year in the Runeterra project's history. That makes it the most revealing document in the file.

What the documents say

The approach became public in early 2026, through a legal dispute between Intrepid's chief executive, Steven Sharif, and one of the studio's investors, Robert Dawson. Among the documents Sharif published was an email from December 2022, sent by Riot's chief financial officer, Mark Sottosanti, to Intrepid's management.

According to Game World Observer's account of the email, Sottosanti wrote that Riot considered Ashes of Creation one of the MMO games with the potential to remain popular for decades, and that Riot was ready to acquire the developer and invest in the game's long-term growth. The proposal, as reported, was an investment of $250 to $500 million in Intrepid, with further funding after the game's release so that the studio could continue to build content.

Intrepid turned the offer down. Sharif's documents attribute the refusal to Dawson, who, in Sharif's telling, opposed the sale because he wanted more control over the studio himself. Dawson has disputed Sharif's account of their dealings, and the two are in litigation, with a counter-suit filed by Sharif. We report the email because both sides accept that it exists; we do not take a side on the rest.

What Merrill confirmed

On 15 April 2026, asked about the reports, Marc Merrill confirmed that Riot had at one point explored investing in or acquiring Intrepid Studios, and that Riot had decided not to move forward with the discussions. He did not give a figure or a date, and did not say who ended the talks.

That is the whole of Riot's comment. It is enough to move the story from "documents published by a party to a lawsuit" to "acknowledged by the other company's co-founder", which is the difference between a claim and a fact.

What Ashes of Creation is

For readers who follow only the Riot side: Ashes of Creation is a subscription MMORPG that raised about $3.3 million on Kickstarter in May 2017 and has been in development since, with a node system in which player activity builds and destroys settlements, and a design that mixes cooperative and competitive play by default. It has been in alpha testing for years and had no release date as of 2026. In most surveys of anticipated MMOs it places first, with the Riot MMO immediately behind it.

It is, in other words, precisely the kind of game Riot said in 2024 it did not want to make: a large, conventional, ambitious MMORPG in the tradition of the genre.

Three readings of the timing

The email is dated December 2022. Greg Street, who announced and led the Riot MMO, left in March 2023. Merrill announced the reset in March 2024 and said it had happened "some time ago". Three readings fit those dates, and the honest position is that we cannot choose between them.

The hedge. Riot wanted an MMO in its portfolio and, two years into its own, was not confident enough in the internal project to bet on it alone. Buying the genre's most anticipated title would have secured the category regardless of what happened in-house. Under this reading, the failed purchase left Riot with only the internal project, which then had to be reset to justify itself.

The complement. Riot never intended Ashes to replace the Runeterra MMO. A traditional MMO under Intrepid and a "different enough" MMO under Riot could coexist, much as Riot publishes several games in each genre it enters. Under this reading, the offer says nothing about the internal project's health, only about Riot's belief that the genre is worth owning twice.

The signal. Sottosanti's phrase, that Ashes could "remain popular for decades", is the same logic Riot applies to League: buy or build the game that will still be played in 2040. Under this reading, the offer is evidence of how long a horizon Riot has for MMOs, which also explains a company willing to spend six years and a full reset on its own.

Our lean, labelled as opinion: the first reading is the most consistent with what followed. An offer of that size, three months before the founder left, followed by a reset, reads like a company that knew its own project had a problem before it said so. But "reads like" is not evidence, and the second and third readings are both compatible with everything Riot has said.

What the number is worth

Whichever reading is right, $250 to $500 million is now the floor for what Riot considers a reasonable price for an MMO it believes in. A company that will pay that for a studio it does not control is not going to under-fund the project it does. Whatever else is uncertain about the Runeterra MMO, its budget is not the constraint, and that is the context for every hiring decision in the WoW all-star team and every year on the clock in why "before 2030", and not sooner.

What we do not know

Whether the talks ended with Intrepid's refusal or with Riot walking away. Merrill's phrasing, that Riot "decided not to move forward", is compatible with either.

Whether the offer was for full ownership or a controlling investment. The reporting says both words.

Whether anyone at Riot's MMO knew. An acquisition run by the finance office need not have involved the team building the competing product, and the timing would have been a difficult thing to tell them.

Whether Riot has approached other studios since. It has bought before, including Hypixel Studios in 2020, and the way that ended is in why the MMO survived Riot's purge. For the place this episode holds in the sequence of events, see the Riot MMO timeline.