Asmongold criticized Riot for a major sales error that led to employee layoffs.

Popular game streamer Asmongold today criticized Riot Games for the mass layoffs on January 22nd, arguing that the company should take more responsibility for the mistakes it made with Riot Forge.

Image source: Asmongold

Riot Forge focuses on creating Runeterra-based games with independent developers to bring the League of Legends universe to more players across different genres. Since its inception, the project has released six titles, including Mageseeker, Ruined King, and most recently, The Song of Nunu. While these are good games in their genre, nothing stands out from the rest, and in Asmongold's opinion, their 'unreasonably' high list prices led to their failure and subsequent downsizing at Riot Games this month.

In a video on this topic on January 24th, the Twitch content creator criticized Riot Games' marketing and finance team for how they set the prices for these games. He claimed that they were 'too expensive for their value,' even though it was based on the League of Legends brand and the Runeterra universe, and that this immediately made the project an inevitable failure.

Furthermore, he continued, Riot failed to pay attention to their biggest audience; Riot players were accustomed to playing free-to-play games, as League of Legends, Valorant, and TFT are all free. This meant the core market Riot was trying to reach with its Forge releases had to be monetized for similar titles – something the company's marketing team failed to do.

'The marketing department at Riot? Like, those are the people they should get rid of. The people who make the financial decisions for those games shouldn't be working in the company anymore,' the game streamer added.

Regardless of what happened behind the scenes, Riot ultimately decided to shut down Riot Forge, meaning they couldn't fix their marketing and pricing issues or find ways to attract more players, such as adding them to the League of Legends client similar to how Blizzard has all their titles in the Battle.net launcher.

Riot's downsizing has also significantly reduced Legends of Runeterra, although it hasn't been completely replaced by Riot and VALORANT yet.