Riot Calls Its MMO the Grail Internally. Its own 39-second clip of Marc Merrill saying so passed 7 million views, and the most-liked public reply is about 2XKO.

The Clip

Riot cut 0:39 out of a 57:55 panel and posted it. The clip did numbers the panel never did.

Riot posted its own MMO to X and the most-liked public reply is about a fighting game it is refunding. The clip is 0:39 long, it is cut from Marc Merrill’s PAX West panel, and Riot captioned it “So about that MMO we’re building…”

The line it exists for is Riot’s internal nickname for the project. “We jokingly call it the Grail internally,” Merrill says, and then: “many a brave knight are going to die, you know, on the Grail quest. But it’s the Grail, so let’s go.”

It travelled. As of September 8 the post has 7,064,975 views, 11,281 likes and 1,026 replies. The 57:55 panel it was cut from has 8,056 views.

What the Clip Leaves Out

Riot posted 39 seconds. Here is the rest of it, from the question that produced the answer to the sentence Merrill actually ended on.

The Grail line did not arrive on its own. Merrill was mid-answer about the unglamorous work of understanding what players need when he reached for the MMO as his example of how hard that gets, “as we think about the MMO we’re building as an example.” He never finished the sentence. Greg Miller of Kind of Funny cut in, and the room went up.

“I’m sorry, the MMO you’re building, please tell us more. What do you have to say about it? You have a title or release date, anything like that, they want to hear about it.”
Greg Miller, to applause from the room

Merrill did not take it. No title, no date, nothing that could be read as a tease. What he gave instead was an appeal to intent, “we know what players hopes and dreams are, right? And all that,” followed by the qualifier that does the real work, “it’s it’s just on us as a team and people. Can we succeed in the execution, you know?” He landed the thought on “But like what a worthy quest.”

Miller answered him, “Oh, yeah.” Only then, with the room already agreeing that the thing was worth attempting, did the nickname come out.

“You know, like we jokingly call it the Grail internally because, you know, we’re like... many a brave knight are going to die, you know, on the Grail quest. But it’s the Grail, so let’s go. You know, like that’s the mindset that we really try to cultivate and that is hard to do at scale.”

That last sentence is the one the 39 seconds do not carry, and it is the one that tells you what kind of statement this is. Merrill names it himself: a mindset his company tries to cultivate, “and that is hard to do at scale.” The clip ends on “so let’s go,” which reads as a promise. The full passage ends on an admission about how difficult that attitude is to hold on to inside a studio the size of Riot.

Two things are worth keeping apart. The nickname is real and it is Riot’s own, which is the newsworthy part of the whole exchange. The rest is a claim about temperament, and he tells the same story earlier in the hour about esports and about Arcane, both of which he says drew heavy internal resistance before they worked. Nothing in the passage is a schedule, a scope or a sign of one.

The Hour Around It

Riot’s co-founder took PAX West’s opening slot for 57:55, a 20-year retrospective in which the MMO came up exactly twice.

Marc Merrill is Riot’s co-founder and its first Chief Product Officer, and he sat for the first panel of PAX West 2026 with Greg Miller of Kind of Funny hosting. PAX put the whole thing on YouTube at 57:55.

What the hour is really about is scale. Riot is 20 years old, founded in 2006 by Merrill and Brandon Beck, and it now runs 87 legal entities and employs about 4,500 people across more than 20 offices. Merrill spends most of the panel on why that size makes shipping anything new difficult.

The MMO surfaces twice in all of that, and both times it turns into a conversation about something else. Once as the example he reaches for when he wants to describe difficulty, once as a question put to him directly. Everything below is those two moments and the room they happened in.

A Paid Riot Game

One line in the middle of the hour is the closest Riot has come to a business-model statement in years.

Twenty-five minutes in, talking about studios that pick a genre off a portfolio chart, Merrill said something Riot has not said this plainly before.

“Just as a note, like we have no strategic imperative that every game from Riot needs to be free either. And you know, we’re working on some stuff that isn’t as an example, right? And so that’s another thing that’s important. It’s, you know, we did that, you know, for the game. Like the business model needs to fit the game.”

It matters because the MMO monetization debate has been running on borrowed material for years. The only Riot statements anyone quotes are Greg Street’s, and they are from 2022: a January tweet saying Riot wasn’t ready to talk about it but hoped players would spend “because they want to not because they feel like they have to,” and an interview where he said pay-to-win and pay-to-power were “just not Riot’s philosophy.” Street left Riot in March 2023 and the project was reset in March 2024, so both statements predate the game being built now.

So the honest position is unchanged. We have written about what a Riot MMO would have to avoid and about the line Aion 2 drew with a subscription and no pay-to-win, and RuneScape deleting 298 microtransactions is the closest thing the genre has to a controlled experiment. None of that is a Riot commitment, and Merrill’s line does not become one.

The 2XKO Shadow

By Merrill’s own account 2XKO never reached critical mass, Riot is refunding players, and he spent part of the hour telling people not to read it as a warning.

The reason a no-news hour landed badly is sitting fourteen minutes into the same video. Merrill spends a long stretch on 2XKO, from meeting Tom and Tony Cannon in about 2015, the engineers who founded EVO and open-sourced the GGPO netcode library, through to what happened at the end. He is not defensive about the outcome so much as about the reading people are taking from it.

“First of all, I wouldn’t characterize 2XKO as a mistake… we delivered a game that’s beautiful, you know, that took risks, you know, with the tag system, all sorts of stuff.”

On the wind-down he refers to refunding players and to keeping the game live. And then he addresses the fear directly.

“A lot of people are like, oh my god, I’m concerned about what this means for all sorts of other games, and it’s like, well, you shouldn’t be.”

That line matters here because the most-liked public reply to Riot’s own clip of the Grail quote is about 2XKO, which makes “well, you shouldn’t be” the answer to the loudest thing anyone said back. It is about a company refunding a game it spent years promoting, telling the people who bought into that promotion not to draw conclusions from it.

The Last Question

Asked point-blank where the MMO is, he answered with a list that didn’t include it.

With six minutes left, Miller gave him the open goal: where is this MMO, what is going on with Riftbound, where is another season of Arcane.

Merrill answered with Riftbound, League Classic, Valorant, a new TFT set, and Wild Rift. Five games. He never came back to the MMO, and he never came back to Arcane either. Then he closed the door on the format entirely.

“But no, we’re not, I’m not here to promote anything, you know. I’m actually here to sort of say thank you.”

Taking him at his word is probably fair. Miller had already offered him the floor to promote something and mentioned he had been handed notes he never looked at, and the panel was billed as a 20-year retrospective rather than a showcase. The counter-reading is that Riot clipped the MMO moment for its own account within a day, which is a promotional decision about a thing he had just declined to promote.

The Reaction

Riot’s clip drew the numbers. The panel’s own comment section is where the arguments are legible.

Two channels, and they are not the same size. Riot’s clip has 1,026 replies, of which exactly one third-party reply renders for a reader without an X account. The PAX upload’s comment section is small enough to read in full: YouTube’s counter says 22 and its public API returns 20 of them, 15 top-level comments and 5 replies. Those 20 are where the counts below come from. It is close to the whole public population rather than a sample of it, and 20 people is not a referendum.

The single loudest voice anywhere is on X, not YouTube. @willis_kin’s reply to Riot’s own post has 5,318 likes and 110,996 views, so that one reply was seen more than thirteen times as often as the panel it is replying to. It came with a Christian Bale “Impressive. Very nice.” reaction GIF, which we have not carried here.

The release-window claim in there is worth flagging on its own. One commenter says Merrill gave a “before 2030” window in a YouTube Short. No such statement appears in the PAX panel, and we could not source it anywhere else, so it stays attributed to the commenter and nothing more. It is the only date anyone in either thread puts forward.

Where It Splits

One camp is reading the line as news about the game. The other is reading it as news about Riot.

The two readings are not really about the same question. One camp is reading the Grail line as a signal about the game. The other is reading it as a signal about Riot. Both are quoted above, and neither is being unreasonable with what they have. The argument is about Riot, not about Runeterra.

The overlap in that last row is the actual state of play. Nobody in either thread is arguing about the game’s design, because there is no design to argue about yet. The group-finder fight is what a real MMO argument looks like, and this isn’t one.

What This Means for the Riot MMO

The nickname is the only genuinely new fact. The doctrine underneath it is the useful part.

For the game itself, nothing. The nickname is the only genuinely new fact in the hour, and the only confirmed fact about the MMO is still that it is set in Runeterra. Which regions, which era, how much of the map, what it costs, and what you play it on are all open. What the panel gives instead is doctrine, in Merrill’s own words.

The load-bearing line is his split between production value and resonance. “If you have to choose one, choose resonance,” he said, and described the alternative as “a beautiful bridge to nowhere... cars won’t drive on it because it’s not relevant.” Applied to an MMO, that is a specific bet. A Runeterra that feels right beats a Runeterra that renders well.

The world he would be drawing on is already written, and it is not short of knights-and-quests material. Demacia has standing monster-hunting contracts. The Freljord has a lodge whose roll of names is mostly dead climbers. Ionia has an occupation that never fully ended, and Shurima has a buried empire with survivors still walking around in it. Riot’s own cinematics are the clearest statement of that tone.

The second useful frame is the Starfleet metaphor. Riot is the fleet, League is the Enterprise, Valorant is Voyager, and the job is to “always incubate and create new starships and train crews that are amazing.” Under that model the MMO is not a bet on a genre, it is a bet on a crew, which is why the studio and its hires tell you more than any panel does. The man who ran WoW PvP for 11 years is already on it.

One line is the only place he gestures at what playing it would be like. Listing what players might come to love beyond League, he says “maybe they’ll love running around the world.” That is the entire product description.

Your Take

Our readers vote here. The argument itself is still running on the source threads.

What to Watch

Riot Discovery posts job ads on a schedule. The MMO does not, so the hiring is the live signal.

The panel gave the project a nickname and a mindset Merrill called “hard to do at scale”. Scale is the part that files public updates. The studio has a name, Riot Discovery, nineteen live ads sit under it, three say “unpublished MMO” in plain text, and the three newest landed in Los Angeles in the last week.

Those ads name what the game has. Riot hired the man who ran World of Warcraft PvP for eleven years, and WoW’s own director framed staffing as the honest number, a team sized to the crowd it expects. The group-finder argument is a question a staffing sheet answers before a reveal does. Watch the req titles, the offices, and which ones quietly close.

Riot’s MMO Studio Is Called Riot Discovery

Hiring

Riot Hired the Man Who Ran WoW PvP for 11 Years

Industry

Riot MMO Fans Are at War Over Group Finder

Community