Riot Games’ documented purchase price, and the valuation nobody filed

A private company discloses what it likes. A company listed on a stock exchange discloses what its listing rules require, to a timetable, in a form its auditors and its regulator can examine. When a listed acquirer buys a private studio, the private studio’s price therefore becomes public, not because the studio chose to publish it, but because the buyer had to.

That is the mechanism behind the figure above. The consideration, the resulting shareholding and the date all come from the acquirer’s own report to its investors. It is the strongest class of evidence available for a company valuation: a number a listed business stated about its own cash.

It is also, precisely, a purchase price for a stake at one moment. It is not what the company was worth later, and it is not what it would fetch now.

Documented: the historical purchase price and stake, the date control passed, and whatever the parent chooses to report about the segment in its own filings: sometimes revenue, occasionally profit, rarely both.

Not documented: any present-day valuation, employee counts unless the parent publishes them, and the earnings of any individual associated with the studio. This site’s companies section treats a filing as evidence about the filer and nothing else, which is why the section is organised by document rather than by company.