Riot Games is an American computer game publishing company. It was founded in 2006 in Los Angeles. Currently, its main office is located in Santa Monica, and its branches are located all over the world. The company is known for its first and so far only game – League of Legends, which was released on October 27, 2009.
Riot Games was founded in 2006 and had over 1,000 employees and $1.3 billion in revenue in 2014. At the same time, the company’s policy, as they themselves position it, is aimed at the fact that they make the game not for the sake of money, but for the sake of players. Perhaps, just in this policy of the company lies such an outstanding commercial success of the game.
So how did it all start? Back in 2006, 2 friends, Mark Merrill, and Brandon Beck, admiring games like Warcraft 3 and Starcraft, decided to create their own video game development studio. Organized in the city of Los Angeles, the small, ambitious group of enthusiastic developers began work on their game, which they announced in 2008. The game attracted a lot of attention from such big companies as Tencent Holdings, Benchmark, and FirstMark, having received funding from them for more than 8 million dollars, Riot Games continued to work on their project. On October 27, 2009, the game League of Legends was released.
In 2010, League Legends won 4 awards for MMOs, as well as fan recognition. As of 2011, the game had about 12 million players and a third of this number played constantly. After a series of such merits, the developers decided to bring the game into cybersport. In 2012, the company organized its world championship with a prize fund of $2 million.
In 2011, 93% of Riot Games’ shares were bought by Tencent. Tencent is one of the largest Internet providers in China. It owns WeChat messenger and the QQ.com portal. Tencent owns many Chinese MMOs and is the distributor of Candy Crush Saga on the Chinese mobile market. In addition, Tencent owns a significant portion of Activision Blizzard and 40% of Epic Games. And in 2016, Tencent fully acquired the company Riot Games.
Riot Games is now one of the largest video game studios worldwide, and League of Legends is one of the pillars of cybersports.
What is Riot Games?
Riot Games is the name of an American video game developer behind the creation of games such as League of Legends and Valorant. League of Legends has been played 24/7 by millions of fans around the world since 2009, with its creator, Riot Games, developing popular related resources including cybersports tournaments and television shows.
In terms of visual identity, Riot Games is a real rebel. Starting from the intense color palette and finishing with the main graphical symbol of the company, everything in the Riot Games logo declares strength and passion.
The first Riot Games logo was created in 2006 and stayed with the company for longer than a decade. It was a bright red “Riot” graffiti on a black wall, with the lettering outlines in black and white and accompanied by an image of a white fist on top of it. The “Games” tagline was written in all capitals of an extended sans-serif typeface, in black.
In 2019 the visual identity of Riot Games has undergone a significant transformation. The color palette was reduced to just red on white, and all of the elements of the logo were redrawn in a more laconic style. The fist was enlarged and set on the left from the two-level lettering in a geometric sans-serif typeface with square cuts of the lines. The fist was also drawn more geometrically, with sharp angles and straight lines.
The redesign of 2022 has brightened up the red shade of the Riot Gales logo and switched the typeface of the lettering to a more traditional one, however, small sharp cut-outs were added to the first and last characters in “Riot”, adding uniqueness to the wordmark. The emblem was also slightly refined — the fist is now placed under a small angle.
The bold uppercase lettering from the primary Riot Games logo is set in a traditional geometric sans-serif typeface with just two small elements customized. The closest fonts to the one, used in this insignia, are, probably, Eloquia Display Bold, or Okomito Next Bold.
As for the color palette of the Riot Games visual identity, it is based on a bright and intense shade of red, a symbol of power, passion, and excellence, which the company brings into all of its projects.