According to a new report, League of Legends and Valorant developer Riot Games has canceled an unannounced Super Smash Bros.-style platform fighter by the name of Pool Party.
This report comes from former Washington Post reporter Mikhail Klimentov, who cites "current and former Riot Games employees familiar with the decision". According to Klimentov and his sources, Pool Party was canceled in late May.
Klimentov says that around 70-80 Riot employees were working on the project, and that of those staffers, around half of them have "received an offer to be reassigned within the studio", while others are seeking new positions via Riot's "internal job board".
A further ten employees weren't offered work elsewhere within Riot and didn't apply for internal jobs either, according to Klimentov, which presumably means they either left or were laid off. It wouldn't be the first round of layoffs within Riot this year if that was the case.
According to Klimentov's report, Pool Party began life as a hardcore fighting game before morphing into a more casual-friendly project that aimed to compete with Super Smash Bros., particularly in light of Nintendo's strange relationship with that game's esports scene.
However, Klimentov says Riot was "spooked" by what the studio perceived to be the "failure" of Warner Bros' platform fighter MultiVersus, which was released in full earlier this year after an extensive beta period.
This "failure" caused Riot to reassess whether there was a public appetite for a Smash Bros. competitor, and with more hardcore fighter 2XKO in the works, it's clear Riot decided to shift its priorities, assuming the report is correct.
Klimentov quotes Riot's senior comms director Joe Hixson as saying that the studio "always ha[s] a number of projects in various phases of R&D", and that "spinning projects up and down" is a regular occurrence.
Still, it's a shame to think that whatever work Riot's staff did on Pool Party will be lost forever. Not for the first time, I think it'd be a good idea for the studio to release what it had, just so we can see what Pool Party might have been like.
