I've finally formulated why Arcane resonated with me so much.

It's a story about how one person's stubbornness and the creative thought "what if?" led to a huge volume of high-quality, beautiful work, which took at least one company — the animation studio Fortiche — to a new level.

It's gratifying when the people at a company love their product. You can see it from a kilometre away; that kind of love can't be faked.

And conversely, even if the product looks modern and fashionable and uses the latest engine features, if its creators didn't love what they were making you get counterfeit Chinese Christmas decorations. They glitter like the real thing but bring no joy at all.

The main problem with putting a piece of yourself into what you make is that it's hard to find understanding among your environment, your client, your colleagues — and in that case everything falls apart. The best outcome only happens when the whole team works from similar premises and everyone enjoys the work.

I can create that arrangement within a small department. Many of the people who've worked under me know that I worry about the team's emotional state considerably more than about KPIs.

But setting a good temperature inside the department isn't enough — your client has to be on the same wavelength, whether that's a CEO, an investor or just a customer. And that's usually where it all starts to come apart: either the CEO doesn't care about the result because he has deadlines, or the client wants to make his terribly important edits at the end that cross out most of the work, or investors don't want to fund extra months because they treat your work as a business asset, goods on a shelf.

Which is why Arcane is so valuable. Yes, it expanded the LoL universe; yes, it served as marketing for a questionable MOBA. But if the team's attitude to it had been that of a long advert or a way to squeeze more money out of the game's fans, nothing would have come of it.

Fortiche's client was Christian, who didn't merely care about the project — he lived it for all those years. Riot's leadership approved a budget sufficient for two seasons back at the start of work on the first (the figure of $250 million gets thrown around). Nobody was rushing them, the company's future didn't depend on this work, nobody expected Arcane to bring in wild profits, and feeding your children and paying your rent weren't on the agenda either.