Who will be Ghostcrawlers replacement? This question has echo’d in tyhe minds of Riot MMO pre-fans since ghostcrawler announced his departure from the project all the way back in March. But would it surprise you to know that he already had a replacement back in January?
Well we now know…Vijay Thakkar!
Vijay Thakkar took over as the EP of the Riot MMO back in January of 2023, keep in mind this was nearly 3 months before Greg Street even announced he would be stepping down. At the time of me making this video he has been in the role for nearly 7 months already, probably the perfect time to make an official announcement and uh…I don’t know, maybe do an interview with one of the LARGEST league of legends content creators?
So that leads us into our next BIG question, Who is Vijay Thakkar?
Vijay’s gaming career, as well as his MMORPG pedigree starts all the way back in 2004 on the critically acclaimed sandbox MMORPG set in the Star Wars Universe, Star Wars Galaxies. He would spend his time at Sony Onliine Entertainment as a ful stack engineer and would see to adding new features to the client and server for the base game as well as the Jump to Lightspeed expansion. Star Wars Galaxies for me is one of my favorite old school MMO’s given its amazing player housing, trade and economy systems. F’s in chat though as it is now shut down aside from a few active private servers.
After his time at Sony he would join Ensemble studios from 2006 to 2009. During his time at Ensemble he would brush shoulders with Greg Steet while working on Age of Empires. He was brought on initially for his MMO experience where he would work on an unannounced and ultimately unreleased MMO that was rumored to be set in the Halo universe.
After Ensemble Vijay would hop around between a few different game studios working on everything from Words with Friends, a mobile multiplayer word game, to other mobile games as a service games at Jolly Company which would eventually be acquired by the acquisitions Go’ds over at Riot Games.
And that brings us up to his experience with Riot Games and the Future of the Riot MMORPG project.
He initially started at Riot in 2016 working on an unnannounced R&D title that eventially would turn into what we know now as Wild Rift. After which he would officially start on the Riot MMO as the Technical Director on April of 2021.
Then in January of this year, 3 months before Greg Street announced his departure, he would take over as Executive Producer on the Riot MMO.
Now I could only be guessing as to how this may have looked internally, but normally in this kind of enironment one would help train and get their replacement comfortable in the role before they would leave. Something I could imagine Greg Street doing in the 3 month over layover.
This would also be pretty standard for Riot as they are currently doing the exact same thing with their CEO position.
There is a lot of change going on at Riot right now, and hopefully a lot to look forward to. Whether its an interview with Vikay and Mark Yetter that is coming out this week over on Necrit’s channel or the CEO transition even higher up.
Personally I need some time to think about Vijay taking the reins over the MMO, obviously one person does not control the whole project but I am curious to hear about what his vision is for the future of the Riot MMO.
