Riot really wants LoL Arena to stick around and be ‘sustainable long term’

Arena has taken another big step towards permanency in League of Legends with Riot Games now investing more experimentation and resources into the fast-paced mode to keep it around long into the future.

League Arena has unquestionably been a success, with players falling in love with the two-vs-two-vs-two-vs-two playlist more and more each time it goes live. This clear victory⁠—as well as Swarm’s massive hype⁠—has inspired Riot to double down on new modes and prop up those already running.

What that investment entails wasn’t made clear by Riot when the developers shared upcoming plans in a July blog on League modes this week, but there will be “experimentation” on a level not seen in-house in some time. They will be measured risks, Riot explained, but everything will be driven toward one dedicated goal: Find a world where Arena hits a permanent sweet spot among League’s games.

“You see that with Arena—we sent it out, saw where players wanted to engage, then brought it back to the lab,” Sope “Riot Sopebox” May explained. “Our goal is to get it to that point where it’s sustainable long term.”

Super popular side modes like Swarm or Arena won’t ever overtake the gameplay set on Summoner’s Rift, of course, but Riot has realized its mistake by leaving extra playlists on the backburner in the last few years. Instead, the team now wants to go in the other direction and “keep improving modes over time.”

This is all very good news for League players who feared Arena could eventually go the same way as shelved playlists like Nexus Blitz, Odyssey, and Twisted Treeline.

“Games modes are important,”  Yunfei Fei, who has worked on Wild Rift and Swarm, declared. There are two reasons for that, the Riot dev continued: One, they keep the flagship title “alive” (particularly important as the game clicks through its second decade) and two, they shape as perfect staging grounds for any big changes that could head to the Rift eventually.

For the time being, Arena will likely still stay on a rotating format. Its current run definitely has an expiry date; doors will close in early September. That shuttering should then lead to Riot taking the tools to the mode.

With all the big investments coming now though, Arena’s third appearance may well be the one that sees it stay in League forever. For now, we can only hope.