Annapurna Interactive’s Head of Games Leanne Loombe has spent more than 18 years in games leadership, from Need for Speed at EA to leading Riot Forge and running external games at Netflix. She explains why “people are too afraid to take risks and there’s just no innovation in our industry right now”, and why the studios copying League of Legends keep launching games nobody turns up to play.
Leanne worked on Need for Speed’s “living game” at EA before live service became an industry norm, then led Riot Forge, the publishing label that put League of Legends in the hands of small studios such as Airship Syndicate and Double Stallion. She joined Netflix as VP of External Games, where her team released the GTA Trilogy on mobile and more. Today she runs publishing and development at Annapurna Interactive, home of Mixtape, Forever Ago and D-Topia.
The conversation opens with what Need for Speed taught her about giving players more than one way into a franchise. From there it moves into her case that the industry has become “templatised”. A League of Legends player has ten years of time, money, friends and habit tied up in the game they already play, and “you’re only going to go somewhere different if it’s actually different”.
Leanne explains forever games and completable games through a Sunday buffet and a Michelin star restaurant. On Riot Forge, she covers the League fans who cosplay the champions and watch the music videos but have no interest in a competitive MOBA, Mass Effect, and the mistake she says the team sometimes made as a publisher. At Netflix, a new games unit was measured against 20 years of film and TV success without the years it took streaming to reach House of Cards.
She closes on Annapurna, where film, TV and games sit under one roof: the pitches she’d love to play and still turns down, why she thinks the industry isn’t through the worst of it yet, and why she believes $200 million to $300 million games have no market.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Introduction
1:30 Running Games at Annapurna: Mixtape, Forever Ago and D-Topia
5:50 Need for Speed’s “Living Game” and What Live Service Still Misses
8:43 Why “People Are Too Afraid to Take Risks”
10:24 Why Copying League of Legends Keeps Failing
16:25 Remedy, Control Resonant and Moving IP Into Other Mediums
17:06 The Buffet and the Michelin Star: Forever vs Completable Games
22:01 Streets of Rage, Animal Crossing and What Finishing a Game Means Now
25:17 Riot Forge: Giving League of Legends to Small Studios
31:02 What She’d Do Differently, and When a Publisher Should Direct
33:11 Why Games Were So Hard to Build Inside Netflix
38:21 Film, TV and Games Under One Roof at Annapurna
41:16 Taste vs the Numbers: How Annapurna Greenlights
43:38 Ecosystems or Standalone IP?
45:09 Close and “I Don’t Think We’re Out of the Worst of It Yet”
ABOUT LEANNE LOOMBE
Leanne Loombe is EVP, Head of Games at Annapurna Interactive. She was VP of External Games at Netflix, led Riot Forge at Riot Games, and worked on Need for Speed at Electronic Arts and Magic: The Gathering at Wizards of the Coast.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/leanneloombe
Annapurna Interactive: annapurnainteractive.com
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