Riot Games has officially acquired Wargaming Sydney, one of the largest game studios in Australia. Going forward, the company will be known as Riot Sydney, and will turn its attention towards development support for ongoing Riot Games projects – including live service titles like Valorant and League of Legends. It will also develop prototypes for new game features, add-ons, and other tools.
Development staff currently working at Wargaming Sydney will remain with Riot in their current Sydney premises – although a press release noted the publishing arm of the business will remain under the Wargaming banner.
‘We are really excited to bring these talented developers and teams to Riot,’ Marc Merrill, Co-Founder and President of Games for Riot said in a press release. ‘The Rioters that have had the opportunity to work with members of the Sydney team are confident not only in the tech they’ve built over the years but, more importantly, in the people who’ve built it.’
‘Naz (Naresh Hirani, Head of Development, Riot Sydney) and the dev teams at the studio have a long history of working in ways that will complement Riot’s ability to deliver value to our players and we really look forward to collaborating with them.’
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Riot Sydney will reportedly be a ‘key contributor’ to ongoing projects at Riot Games, and will further aid the growth of the local Australian games industry. Going forward, Riot plans to ‘add expert talent from veteran studios’ to better support its endeavours.
Notably, this isn’t the first time Riot Games has had a presence in Australia. In 2013, the company established a major studio in Pyrmont that operated for nearly a decade. In 2020, amidst the dissolution of the Oceanic Pro League and global economic circumstances, it was unceremoniously shut down.
Given Wargaming Sydney is an established studio, one backed by veteran talent and the power of the BigWorld engine – a proprietary tool that reportedly sparked the interest of Riot Games – there’s high hopes for this acquisition. The impact of this change will be felt in the coming months.
