With the song "Legends Never Die" gaining popularity online, even those who had never played *League of Legends* started playing the game specifically because of it. Once they started, they were hooked. As a phenomenal game—the kind where you’d find eight out of ten computers in any internet café running it—anyone with even a slight interest in online games was bound to get drawn in. After all, mobile gaming was still in its infancy, and there were very few true competitors for *League of Legends*.
During this time, Ye Ge leveraged Paper Dove Games to reach a partnership with Riot Games. Having secured their authorization, he was cleared to produce an anime series based on the game. In fact, Riot Games had long harbored ambitions of creating anime and films. Games, anime, films, and merchandise—this was the ultimate realization of IP value. If you played the game, you would want to watch the anime; once you watched the anime, you would go see the film. If you had some extra cash, you would buy the merchandise. The cycle worked in reverse, too: if you grew interested in the merchandise, you would go back and explore the rest. It was a perfect, positive cycle, and no IP didn't want to achieve it.
However, Riot Games was still in its early stages and lacked the bandwidth to develop other aspects of its IP; at most, they could manage merchandise. As for outsourcing anime or film production? That was even less likely. Anime and film served as the "cultural interpretation" of a g…
Chapter 502