Will the Riot MMO be free-to-play? What Riot's record says

Riot Games has released six games it made itself, and all six are free to play: League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, Legends of Runeterra, Valorant, Wild Rift and 2XKO. The only Riot-branded games that ever charged up front were the five Riot Forge titles, made by outside studios, and Riot closed that label in January 2024.

So the short answer is yes, probably. Before the reset, Riot said the MMO would be free-to-play with cosmetic monetisation and that a subscription was unlikely. Nothing since has contradicted that. But an MMO is the one genre in which Riot's model has real difficulties, and the more useful question is what a free Runeterra MMO would have to give up, and whether the company's other promises survive it.

What was said

The pre-reset statements, made between 2021 and 2023 under Greg Street, were consistent: free to play, funded by cosmetics, no pay-to-win, subscription improbable. Those statements are in the same category as everything else from that period: stated once, not repeated since March 2024. We keep the list of them in the 2024 reset, explained.

Two things make this one more durable than the others on that list. It is not a design decision so much as a corporate one, and Riot has never made a different corporate decision. And Marc Merrill's reset post objected to the game being too similar to existing MMOs; a free Riot game is not the similar part.

The case for

It is how Riot makes money. League's revenue is skins, and it has been enough to fund a company of seven to eight thousand people for fifteen years. Valorant, Teamfight Tactics and Wild Rift run the same way. The company's entire apparatus, from its art pipeline to its seasonal cadence to its regional pricing, is built to sell cosmetics to players who paid nothing to enter.

It removes the barrier the MMO most needs removed. League has more than a hundred million players, most of whom have never played an MMO. A box price or a subscription is a filter that keeps most of them out. Free entry is how Riot would turn its existing audience into the MMO's audience, and that conversion is the commercial point of the project.

It is what the audience expects. Nobody who has followed the MMO since 2020 has assumed they would pay for it.

The case against

Cosmetics work when identity is visual and the game gives you nothing else to want. In an MMO, appearance is progression. The armour you wear is the armour you earned, and a cash shop that sells better-looking armour than the raid drops is a shop that competes with the game's own reward system. Every free MMO has had to solve this, and most have solved it by selling the appearance of gear, transmogrification in the trade's word, as a separate layer. That works. It also means the pre-reset mention of transmogrification was probably a monetisation note as much as a feature.

Then there is the promise Riot made in 2021 and has not repeated: a game that "respects the player's time" and limits fear of missing out. Riot's free games do not run that way. They run on seasons, battle passes and limited-time content, because that is the machinery that makes a free game earn. A free MMO without that machinery would be a first for the company. A free MMO with it would be in direct tension with the one design principle Street put at the centre of the project.

And there is the pay-to-win line. Riot has never crossed it, and its reputation on that point is a real asset in a genre where players assume the worst. But an MMO offers more places to cross it than any other genre: experience boosts, inventory space, faster travel, crafting materials, housing land. None of those is a stat. All of them are convenience that the game can withhold. Whether Riot sells them is the decision that will define how its MMO is received, and it is a harder decision in an MMO than it ever was in League.

What "different enough" might mean here

Merrill's reset was about design, not business. But the two are not separable in this genre, because the business model dictates the content cadence, and the content cadence is most of what an MMO is.

One reading of "different enough" is a game that does not run on the subscription-era treadmill of dailies, weeklies and gated seasons. If that is the direction, then Riot has to fund the game some other way, and its two proven ways are cosmetics and passes. A Runeterra MMO whose only monetisation is skins and housing decoration would be a genuine departure for the genre, and it is the version that fits both the 2021 promise and the 2024 reset. It is also the version with the least certain revenue, which is why we would not bet on it being the whole answer.

Our estimate, labelled: free to play, cosmetics and housing as the core, a seasonal pass of some kind, and a firm line on stats. That is Riot's record applied to the genre, and the company has not, so far, changed its record.

What we do not know

Whether the business model was part of the reset. It was pre-reset intent, and nothing since has confirmed it.

Whether a subscription tier exists for convenience, the way several free MMOs offer one. "Unlikely" was the word used in 2021.

Whether Riot's regional pricing, which makes League affordable in markets a subscription MMO cannot reach, will apply. This is the decision with the largest effect on the game's eventual size.

Whether the reset's "different enough" includes the economy at all. If it does not, expect a Riot game. If it does, expect something Riot has not built before, and the company's silence covers that as well as everything else. For the rest of what is and is not known, see everything we actually know about the Riot MMO.