The League of Legends Wild Rift console release is axed to “prioritize mobile investments,” says its executive producer.
Riot finally provided an update to the console release of League of Legends: Wild Rift, almost five years after the mobile version's release.
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Wild Rift console update from EP Riot Papa Smoothie
David Xu, also known as Papa Smoothie, is the Executive Producer of Wild Rift at Riot Games. He broke the news that the Wild Rift console version will be axed via a post on X.
"I wanted to officially let y’all know that we’re not pursuing a console launch at this moment," said Papa Smoothie. This is after he referred to the upcoming VALORANT console release and the 2XKO updates. "This was a deliberate decision to prioritize mobile investments."
"Our goal is to bring the right games to the right platforms for players, so while we see games like VAL or 2KXO show up on consoles because of the existing popularity of those genres on the platform, we haven’t seen the same for the MOBA genre," he continued. "Splitting our dev team's focus between console and mobile wasn’t a tradeoff we felt was right for WR players right now."
There are no majorly popular MOBAs like Wild Rift on console. Arena of Valor (now known as Honor of Kings) had a brief stint on the Nintendo Switch before dropping support a few years ago. Another game, Predecessor, is trying to capitalize on the lack of MOBAs on modern consoles.
Papa Smoothie concluded by reassuring the existing Wild Rift players of the team's commitment to improving the game. "Currently we are looking into matchmaking, queue times, and game balance. Longer term we are looking to address basic mobile experiences such as login, download, and network stability."
Funnily enough, the official League of Legends Wild Rift website still reads "coming soon to consoles."
