League of Legends maker Riot Games and French animation studio Fortiche are days away from releasing the first batch of episodes from the second and final season of their Emmy award-winning animated series, Arcane, on Netflix. While the show has garnered accolades for its stunning visuals, riveting storytelling, and being a safe alternative to experiencing the lore of the game’s mythos without dealing with its players, the Netflix series also has the distinction of being the most expensive shows of all time. The price tag for Arcane’s 18 episodes comes out to a cool 250 million dollars.

According to a report from Variety, Riot Games is struggling to progress deeper into the entertainment industry because it spent so much money getting Arcane out the door. Much of this liminality is due to the company’s inexperience in navigating the industry. This experience led the company to spend $60 million reportedly on the marketing for Arcane‘s first season, a price tag that Variety notes far exceeds the norm for a show not being distributed by its studio.

Another interesting wrinkle of the Variety report is that Arcane was initially billed as a five-season show. While Netflix’s announcement that the upcoming second season would see the conclusion of its storyline between protagonists Vi and Jinx came as a shock to fans, things start to make a bit more sense when you look at how much money was collectively being put into the show’s 40-minute episodes. A source close to the show’s production tells Variety production estimated the costs for Arcane‘s first nine episodes to be north of $80 million. Those same sources peg Arcane‘s similarly-sized second season cost around $100 million.

Furthermore, Variety’s report revealed that Riot paid for Arcane‘s marketing out of its pocket, and spent more than Netflix did promoting the show, key among them being an expensive takeover of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai. According to Variety, Arcane season 2 is estimated to have cost far less than its predecessor, though that isn’t saying much when you consider their lengthy tab.

Just when you think Riot couldn’t have spend any more excessive amounts of money to make the show fans know today, it turns out they’d spent a fortune not making a project as well. In 2020, Riot Games initially sought to bring Anthony and Joe Russo of Avengers fame to work on a film set in the League of Legends world. The project never materialized however, resultingt in Riot having to pay the Russo brothers $5 million to walk away from the film because they didn’t want to move forward with a script that was attached to their agreement.

Variety couched this revelation with the ambitious claim from then-Riot CEO Nicolo Laurent, who, in a previous interview, boasted that he was building the “entertainment company of the 21st century. Variety would go on to posit that, for all the spending Riot Games made with Arcane, it doesn’t have much else to show for it. Regardless, Riot co-founder Marc Merril posted through the financial losses in an emailed response to Variety, doubling down on the studio’s Hollywood ambitions.

“Our ambitions in entertainment in entertainment haven’t changed. We were never intending to operate like a traditional studio with traditional timelines. What did change as we learned more was our expectations of ourselves: We realized that getting it right takes a lot more time than we’d originally expected, and so we recalibrated our development, output goals and teams with that in mind.”

Although Merill declined to confirm the $250 million price of Arcane to Variety, he continued, saying: “We’re more than comfortable with the spend it took to deliver a show that was worthy of our players’ time.”

While Riot Games still has projects in development like a live-action limited series and a feature animation project, the company has yet to put any of them into production. What the company has done, which Merrill failed to mention in its “restructuring“—which, unsurprisingly led to a disconnect between the entertainment team and the rest of the company—also resulted in two rounds of mass layoffs this year. The first saw Riot lay off 530 employees in January, and an additional 32 workers in October.

“As part of these changes, we’ve made the tough decision to eliminate some roles. This isn’t about reducing headcount to save money—it’s about making sure we have the right expertise so that League continues to be great for another 15 years and beyond,” Merill wrote in an October Twitter post.

Arcane season 2 would release across November in three acts. Act one will release November 9, Act two November 16, and Act three on November 23.

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