Is thereEager to get your hands on Riot Games' in-development MMO? Marc Merrill hopes to get you in before humans land on MarsGame File's Stephen Totilo questioned the Riot founder on the whens and whys of Riot's far out project.Image credit: Riot Games News by Connor Makar Staff Writer Published on Feb. 19, 2025 Riot Game's Co-Founder Marc Merrill has sat down and answered a few questions about the company's in-development Runeterra MMO during this year's DICE Summit. Sitting down with Game File's Stephen Totilo who published the interview, Merrill jokingly remarked that he hopes the game comes out before we go to Mars. If you're excited for this game, you may want to hunker down for a while.Merill also answered a question on why the company is making an MMO in the first place. MMOs are infamously hard to make. They take a long time, a lot of money, and more often than not break themselves upon the rocks of pre-established giants in the genre. Especially today, when players are locking themselves down to a selection of old-faithfuls, it's a perilous venture. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Merrill responded with the following (though the full quote can be seen by subscribing to The Game File), "I can go through all the laundry list of why its hard, but, you know, I think Riot's exactly the type of company that should go after those types of opportunities, if were trying to make it better for the player."Merrill continues, And with the League IP, we've been investing so much for so long, over time, sort of growing this world and adding dimensions. People want to run around the world of Runeterra. And so we want to help them do that, in ways that are worth it and meaningful to them.It's true that the story of Riot Games over the past few years has been a gigantic push across the entirety of its Runeterra roster of games to expand and enhance the IP as a whole. Arcane proved itself to be a particularly powerful component to this, bringing waves of new people to the IP. League of Legends has recently attempted to capatalize on this increased interest, releasing a new season themed around Noxus (where a future animated series will take place) and having Arcane animation studio Fortiche create a dedicated cinematic trailer for it linking the game back to the Netflix series.As for the MMO, we still aren't entirely clear on how far along it is - though Merrill's statement above indicates it's still very far out from a full release. Back in 2023 Greg Street stepped down from an executive producer role on the game and left to work on a totally different MMO over at Fantastic Pixel Castle.When do you think the Riot MMO will eventually come out? Let us know below!