Is the Riot MMO cancelled? No, and here is the evidence

No. The Riot MMO has not been cancelled, and every piece of evidence from the last two years points the other way. What it has been is reset, in March 2024, and then deliberately silent, which is a different thing that looks similar from outside.

Here is the evidence, dated, and then the three reasons the question keeps coming up.

Five facts that a cancelled project does not produce

On 15 January 2026, Raymond Bartos, formerly lead producer on World of Warcraft, joined Riot as the MMO's Senior Game Producer. He announced it himself.

On 1 June 2026, Brian Holinka, World of Warcraft's former lead PvP and lead combat designer, joined as Principal Game Designer. Massively Overpowered, PCGamesN, Wowhead and Inven Global all reported it in the same week. Studios do not hire a principal combat designer for a game they have stopped making.

On 18 February 2025, Marc Merrill, Riot's co-founder, told Game File at the DICE Summit that the MMO was "probably the project I personally spend the most time on". He was asked directly whether an MMO was still worth pursuing. The answer was "Oh yeah".

On 15 April 2026, Merrill confirmed publicly that Riot had explored investing in or acquiring Intrepid Studios, the developer of Ashes of Creation, and chosen not to. A company that has cancelled its MMO does not spend a year looking at buying a different one to sit beside it.

And in 2026 Merrill gave the project its only public date: "before 2030". You do not date a cancelled game.

There is also the negative evidence. Riot's recruiting page for the MMO, opened in December 2020, is still live. When Riot cancels something it says so: it closed Riot Forge in January 2024, cancelled Hytale in June 2025 and put 2XKO into maintenance mode in August 2026, each with a statement. The MMO has had no such statement. Its last official word is that it is going well.

Why people think it is

Three things feed the rumour, and each is worth knowing on its own.

The silence is deliberate. In March 2024 Merrill announced the reset and said the team would go dark "likely for several years", so that it could concentrate on "the incredible amount of work ahead of them". A project that promises to say nothing and then says nothing is behaving as announced. It is also indistinguishable, month to month, from a project that has died without anyone saying so, which is why every quiet stretch produces this question. The reset itself is explained in the 2024 reset, explained.

The March 2026 leak was about a different game. On the night of 23 to 24 March 2026, the leaker @BigBadBear_ reported that Riot was overhauling or cancelling "Project T". Headlines turned that into the MMO within hours. Project T is a multiplayer shooter set in the Valorant universe, run by a former Destiny 2 production director; it has never been the Runeterra MMO, and nothing in the leak concerned the Runeterra MMO. Mein-MMO's fact-check of the episode is the clearest account. We go through the whole night in the March 2026 cancellation rumour, taken apart, and explain what Project T is in Project T, Riot's other MMO.

Ghost died, and Ghost was Ghostcrawler's. Greg Street announced the Riot MMO in 2020 and left Riot in 2023 to found Fantastic Pixel Castle, whose MMO, Ghost, lost its NetEase funding in 2025; the studio closed on 17 November 2025. Because Street is the name most people attach to the Riot MMO, the death of his later project reads, at a glance, like the death of this one. It was not. Ghost was a different game at a different company, and one of its designers, Holinka, is now working on Riot's.

What a real cancellation would look like

Since the question will come back, here is what would change our answer.

A statement from Riot, which is how the company has handled every closure since 2024.

The MMO recruiting page disappearing, or being redirected.

Senior departures without replacements. The project has lost people, including its technical director in December 2024, but each loss so far has been followed by a senior hire.

An SEC-style disclosure is not available, because Riot is privately owned by Tencent. So the signals above are the ones there are. As of this article's date, none of them has occurred.

The honest caveat

"Not cancelled" is not "on schedule", and the same silence that hides a healthy project would hide a struggling one. Riot has cut quickly since 2024 when momentum failed, and we set out why the MMO has so far been the exception in why the MMO survived Riot's purge. The best current summary of what is and is not known is everything we actually know about the Riot MMO.

This page is updated when the answer changes. The answer, on the date at the top, is no.