LOL dev Riot retaliates to "greedy" taunts

League of Legends developer Riot Games may be many things, but one thing it isn't, stressed president Marc Merrill on Reddit last night, is greedy.

"Greedy how?" he retorted in a thread questioning the whereabouts of a new game client for Season 4 - the original accusation being that Riot was reluctant to spend extra hiring someone from the community to make a new game client, or to put more people on the task in-house. This line of questioning appears to have escalated into something more finger-pointy, although exactly what set Merrill off is now hard to track down.

In the post he dubbed 'How Riot thinks about making money", he added: "You do not have to spend money [in League of Legends], it is completely opt-in." And there are "millions upon millions" who play the game entirely for free, he insisted.

Then there's the money Riot pours into the League of Legends eSports team, he pointed out, and the ad-free telly show.

"Most game businesses focus on metrics like ARPU (average revenue per user) and try to build their entire companies and organisations around optimising for driving to a sale (think Zynga). We do the OPPOSITE," he went on.

"We train our entire company to drive towards ENGAGEMENT, meaning MAKE COOL S*** and deliver VALUE, and if people PLAY enough because they love what we do, then they will WANT to spend money.

"Our focus is entirely different.

"So, no offense," he CONCLUDED, "but I completely disagree with your greed accusation and yes, it pisses me off because I've spent the last eight years of my life building this company, game and team to deliver great value and to treat players well.

"So, thanks for the additional reminder we need to do better at explaining who we are. But F*** me if I don't allow a little emotion to slip in when the takeaway is so utterly wrong for who we are as a company."