Perhaps before talking about League of Legends, it is good to deny the impact that Arcane, the animated line inspired by the world and characters of the game, has had on the world of streaming.
Arcane was once known as the most expensive animated line of all events, with its two seasons costing more than $250 million to build and market. If that figure sounds heavy, that’s because it is. More than that, on the other hand, is far beyond what everyone involved has paid Rebel for it.
That’s because Rebel reportedly spent a lot of its own money on, in effect, generating the screen and, according to an unused Bloomberg listing, the production budget. Although some rumors suggest that more than one season has been in the works, the truth is that the second season of Arcane could be the last, and it probably has a lot to do with production costs.
The financial data is especially brutal considering that Netflix paid Rebel around $3 million per episode, and parent company Tencent paid $3 million to finish the series in China. In total, that’s lower than some of the overall display prices.
The report also makes clear that while Rebel had progressive plans to become a mass media outlet with the support of Arcane, the studio had no clear plan to recoup the show’s costs before it aired. A Rebel spokesperson told Bloomberg that Arcane wasn’t winning on its own, but was helping the industry with alternative techniques. Additionally, they mentioned that the second season is “on track to at least break even financially for us.”
It’s notable to note that, unlike most projects of this nature, Arcane was funded, evolved, and produced by Rebel. The studio was looking for full control of intellectual property and production, so it didn’t opt for the simplest (and most lucrative) type of licensing. That still makes Rebel’s decision to relax its in-development alternative entertainment initiatives and oppose running Arcane make sense.
More interesting than the raw numbers, Arcane supposedly didn’t bring many unused players to League of Legends, nor convince existing ones to spend more on the game. Part of that was achieved through the limited window that screen creators gave Rebel’s designers to create skins for the game and themed events around them (an issue the studio resolved with the second season), but also has a lot to do. with the complicated nature of the game deterring a group of unused players signing up for the first season.
For now, it doesn’t look like Arcane can be adopted through other impressed presentations in the League of Legends sector.
