League of Legends has been a remarkably successful game which brought the MOBA genre into the spotlight as the most played video game in the world with a large competitive E-sports scene. When you look back at how League of Legends started, it is hard to believe how far the game has come. League originally started as a project started by prominent members and developers within the original DOTA community. Brandon “Ryze” Beck and Marc “Tryndamere” Merrill co-founded Riot Games in 2006 and partnered with Steve “Guinsoo” Feak, one of the designers of the original DOTA, and Steve “Pendragon” Mescon, administrator of map support to start the development of League of Legends.
The game started out with a rather small budget. When the game was officially announced in 2008, this is what the trailer looked like:
By comparison, 6 years later in 2014, Riot Games released “A New Dawn”, a new trailer for the game:
Currently, Riot Games lays claim to developing the most played video game in the world. The game went from player base of several thousand players in 2008 an astonishing number in 2014. In 2014, Riot Games released a new set of player statistics:
- Over 67 million players battle it out in League every month
- More than 27 million people play at least one game of League every day
- Over 7.5 million players simultaneously play League during daily peak hours
The growth of League of Legends is quite astonishing and is a result of a combination of game design choices, word of mouth, and the micro-transaction model that the game employs.
League of Legends has many design choices and game mechanics which cater to an extremely wide variety of players. The game is extremely easy to pick up but hard to master. The controls are fairly simplistic compared to other games with similar control schemes. There are only 6 buttons that a player can press. 3 basic ability buttons, 1 ultimate ability button, and 2 summoner spell buttons make for an easy to understand control scheme. However, while the game may look fairly simplistic on the surface, it is difficult to master. There are many gameplay mechanics that a player must master such as last-hitting, zoning, positioning, game knowledge, map control, teamwork, comboing, and simply knowing the limits of your champion and your opponent’s champion. Additionally, the game encourages you to play with your friends and has a strong social aspect to it. This results in many players joining through word of mouth and sticking around because of the strong communities formed around it.
The game also hosts an extremely prominent e-sports scene. Before the rise of League of Legends, e-sports was an extremely niche form of entertainment with games such as Starcraft and Counterstrike being the most popular games for e-sports. However, Riot Games has put an enormous amount of effort into promoting the e-sports scene of League of Legends and its popularity has exploded. In the LCS finals of 2014, the finals were held in Seoul’s World Cup Stadium with a capacity of 66,000 people and had a concurrent viewer count of 11.2 million people. The e-sports scene provides a huge amount of advertising for the game.
A third thing that has helped the game grow is it’s micro-transaction model. League of Legends has no pay to win mechanics and no huge paywalls. A lot of free to play games will sacrifice game quality for monetization of the game. League of Legends avoids this however. The only thing money will get a player in-game are primarily champion skins. However, players can pay to unlock champions with real money instead of in-game currency.
All in all, League of Legends has grown tremendously and was one of the first games to show that micro transactions can be a sole source of income for a game without greatly sacrificing game quality through huge paywalls and other forms of monetization. It will be interesting to see what future projects Riot Games has in store.
I think the eSports presence LoL has made for itself as of late is incredible. LoL players have become celebrities just like the NFL or other sports. With the appeal LoL brings to so many types of people, I can only see this growing.
Honestly, as someone not really taken by the MOBA genre, the fact that even I was addicted to League of Legends for a short while speaks to its wide appeal. I’m usually not a fan of team competitive games, but the synergy and skill that you can achieve working together on a team in LoL was a strange high that no game to date has really matched for me. I don’t play the game anymore, but even I understand that the game has something special going on, especially as one of the first dedicated mainstream MOBAs to hit the market. The game is, in essence, 100% free-to-play, and yet it goes to show that players will support the games / game devs that they want to if given the option.
I think League of Legends has some incredible longevity, and will be played in some incarnation for years to come. The eSports angle in both the western and eastern spheres of the world will aid in this, both encouraging active play to participate and spectatorship to observe, just like physical sporting matches.
So Riot very well might be planning to make more games in the future. I recently went to their site (riotgames.com), and one of the primary navigation links is “Our Games”. Currently LoL is the only one there, but I bet they have some ideas about future offerings.
The rise in popularity of LoL, as many pointed out in this thread, is multi-faceted. Early to market (with Newerth and Demigod – both of which had problems). One of the first AAA games to go free-to-play. Members of Riot were also part of the original DOTA scene. No ‘pay to win’. eSports viable. Then twitch came along, and really propelled it to a new level.
I think LoL can certainly grow more, though MANY companies are pushing out MOBAs (much like how companies started churning out MMOs throughout the first 10 or so years of 2000). Eventually, someone will make a MOBA that is better than LoL. I certainly don’t see that happening anytime soon. I thought Blizzard *might* have a shot, but Heroes of the Storm won’t make much of a dent in LoL’s playerbase. Someday LoL will have an active player curve like World of Warcraft, where the game will have ‘peaked’ and start to see steady decline. That time is nowhere on the horizon, and as long as Riot keeps making good updates, pays attention to the community, and aggressively positions LoL in the eSports scene, the future is very bright.
So I think you’ve missed some pretty significant details in why LoL became so successful in the first place, and it almost certainly goes back to when the game was released. Not only was LoL basically first to market with the MOBA genre, but they were also one of the first major games to aggressively adopt a free-to play model. If you look at the history, the earliest comparable competitor that LoL had at the time was Heroes of Newerth (arguably the better or the two games). The issue HON had, however, (and probably the reason it died out) was the fact that it wasn’t F2P, and its entry skill curve was stupidly high. This limited its player base significantly, and barred anyone who didn’t already know how to play DOTA style games. Much like you said, LoL had/has a much more 80/20 difficulty curve that caters to casual play, which made succeeding significantly easier.
In any case. The primary reason it was a success is almost certainly the fact that it was first to market, and also one of the first companies to adopt a free-to-play model.
As a side note, while LoL is certainly a very large player in terms of the popularity of competitive gaming, I don’t think they were the key player. I’d say Twitch and streaming in general is more responsible for that. Competitive gaming was always very popular. The issue was that it wasn’t broadcast because no-one who did broadcasting knew a damn thing about gaming in the first place. The problem is, gaming news doesn’t belong on traditional mediums (magazines and TV) because gamers are beginning to use those mediums less and less. It’s only a coincidence that LoL got big around the same time competitive gaming got big. I’d say more but I’m running out of time, lol.
I’ve never played League of Legends before, but if it’s anything like DOTA I’m not too interested in trying it (not my type of game.) However, those player statistics are showing staggering numbers. League has more active players than the population of France! Riot Games must be doing something right, and your suggestions on what exactly that is make a lot of sense.
When it comes to the topic of what is your favorite game, my answer will definitely be LOL. It is the first triple A game I have ever played since 2012. My favorite champion is Garen, and as a female player, it is easy to explain that why I choose Garen. Why people want to play video games, obviously, because the gamers can make it possible to complete great success in game. And me as a female, I always want to be as strong and powerful as Garen.
Back to the business mode of LOL and how can it make the players throw money into the game. I actually agree with Gabriel Leydon, he stated that paying money should be fun. Most of the players in LOL spend money on skin and champion, which can be useful and interesting from the perspective of aesthetic.
Overall, I think the Riot Games Company has done great job of making in game purchase fun. Comparatively, some mobile games do need to learn a lesson from LOL, as long as the game makers have spared no efforts to ensure the quality of the games, then the players would be willing to spend money on it.
There have been many discussions that I have had with friends over the popularity of League of Legends. I’ve heard many different reasons for its success from different individuals. However, a topic that I found to be very interesting to talk about is what is the future of League of Legends like?
Surely, it’s hard to imagine this game growing any larger than it already has. There’s only so many people in the world that can be interested in this! But will there ever come a day where the player base of League of Legends declines? This was a more engaging topic to talk about with people of different opinions. Recently, a friend of mine told me something interesting. I don’t exactly remember entirely what he has said but this was my interpretation. He said that Riot will always continue seeing success with League of Legends because they’re a company built around a game rather than a company that builds games. That was a very interesting take on the thought of gaming companies. There are many gaming companies out there that I’ve played games for and from what I can tell, older gaming companies with 1 or 2 games or themes for games in their disposal had far better quality games than companies generating multiple games.
Because of this thought, it’s not surprising League of Legends is wildly successful. Riot is putting all its money in producing quality content and making all aspects of League of Legends such as game content, esports, communicating with fans, etc very important to them.
I completely agree with this! The game’s business model absolutely invites a large playerbase, and having most buyable goods cost less than 5 dollars is a great decision on their part, and definitely helps keep players paying money. It’s also good that any gameplay altering purchases can be bought using the in-game currency, which is generated at a fairly quick rate!