Riot Games recently announced it had invested in Fortiche Production, the Paris-based animation studio behind the hit Netflix show Arcane. This will see Riot own a non-controlling stake of the company while also being allowed to appoint two executives to Fortiche’s board of directors.
“Fortiche has been an integral partner for a long time, but this agreement ensures we’ll be working closely for decades to come,” said Nicolo Laurent, the CEO of Riot, in a press statement. “In working with Fortiche, we collaborate to push the boundaries of what’s possible and raise expectations for how games can be represented in media. As proud as we are of Arcane, we know the best is yet to come.”
Arcane is not the only project that Riot has worked with Fortiche on. The two parties have previously collaborated on various music videos including Get Jinxed, a song that celebrated League champion Jinx.
Arcane has been an unprecedented success since it was released on Netflix last November. During its initial launch week from November 15th to November 21st, it was the most-watched English-language Netflix program in the world.
The Profit‘s Take:
Riot is a favorite of ours. We are usually big fans of the things they are doing. We recently discussed Epic Games buying Bandcamp, which relates to this story in the context that we are seeing more major gaming companies branch out into other forms of entertainment. This is way more genius than the Bandcamp acquisition, though. It’s just a better fit, plain and simple. However, I’m a little thrown off that this is an investment in a non-controlling stake of the company. I don’t get why Riot wouldn’t go ahead and buy the whole studio outright.
(All information was provided by Business Insider and Polygon)