The “S” in Riot Games Stands for “Slow Down”
Until earlier this year, the “s” at the end of League of Legends developer and industry giant Riot Games had been unearned. On June 26, just under 10 years after League of Legends first launched, Riot released its second-ever game, Teamfight Tactics. An “autochess” game based on the characters and world of their wildly successful base game, TFT has seen massive success in a short amount of time, attracting 33 million monthly players in its short life span with a professional scene of its own in the works.
It seems that this mini-strategy game, deep and complex in its own right, is being groomed similarly to its forefather to become a sensation or at the very least another reliable service game. Above all else, it gave players their first tangible grasp at the distant “s” at the end of the company name.
Tonight, Riot blew the door to that “s” wide open. In their 10th anniversary “Riot Pls” stream, Riot announced a deluge of new titles, some rumored but most completely unexpected. The cliffnotes are:
- Teamfight Tactics Mobile.
- Wild Rift, a simplified version of LoL for mobile and consoles.
- Project L, a fighting game based on LoL characters.
- Project A, a first-person, hero-based tactical shooter set in a near-future Earth (notable for being the least-related to LoL proper).
- An unnamed, isometric action game based on the LoL universe.
- Lol Esports Manager, which lets you create and manage a professional team.
- Legends of Runeterra, a card game based on the LoL universe and characters.
TFT Mobile, Wild Rift and Legends of Runeterra are all slated to have playable versions by the end of the year or early 2020, while Projects A and L have yet to put solid dates out — developers said they will be “going dark” with news about the projects for now. However, players can sign up now for Legends of Runeterra’s “preview patch” — that is, if they can get past the signup page which has crashed as of writing this.
While a MOBA, card game, fighter and FPS might feel galaxies away from each other in terms of gameplay, it’s safe to say that Riot has plenty of experience creating and sustaining not just a massive service game but also the massive esports scene which has grown with it. They certainly know how to attract players and keep them around. In fact, as soon as Riot’s stream ended, several big-name streamers were already playing Legends of Runeterra.
However, these are fields which are fraught with competition and legendary namestays. In fighting games, Riot will be competing with the likes of Street Fighter V, Tekken 7 and Dragon Ball FighterZ among others. Their action game could be up against the likes of Diablo III. Legends of Runeterra will be at odds with Blizzard’s Hearthstone. Their first person shooter is perhaps the most under fire, squaring up against titans like CS:GO, Rainbow Six Siege, Destiny 2 and Overwatch, not to mention the other behemoths of the genre.
The question then, is whether or not the market, as well as Riot themselves, can support so many projects at once.
First off, to quell some concerns:
It’s not like Riot isn’t accounting for this steep competition. After all, TFT has already usurped its biggest competitor in DoTA Underlords, and Wild Rift will surely have no trouble beating out the many LoL-copycats which once plagued the mobile market before Riot themselves shut them down. And Riot’s already begun differentiating Legends of Runeterra from Hearthstone, emphasizing its no-cost-of-entry to appeal to those who lament that Blizzard’s title has become too expensive.
But Riot isn’t just competing with other games in each genre; They’re competing with service games as a whole. The market is overflowing with games that strive to be players’ part-time job. While they are separated by genres, Riot’s titles will still be competing to some degree with well-established games like Overwatch, Destiny 2, Final Fantasy XIV, and yes, League of Legends.
Most of these titles also feature steep learning curves which sort of contributes to a sunk-cost dillemma — “It was so hard for me to get to this point with Street Fighter, so what if it takes me just as long to learn Rainbow Six?”
If the rollouts of TFT and Legends of Runeterra are anything to go by, Riot plans for all of these titles to be exactly this type of constantly evolving service title, and all are notably in genres with traditionally high learning curves.
The strategy for Riot is likely to use the massive built-in audience of League of Legends to support these new games, and fill in the gaps by drawing both new players and those from rival titles. You can already see the latter in how they’ve rolled out Legends of Runeterra.
So the question marks are compounded. Is League of Legends’ install base large enough to support so many competitive titles? Will these games be able to compete in saturated genres? Will all of Riot’s titles survive in the congested marketplace of games as a service, or will they go the way of Lawbreakers?
Riot certainly has structures in its favor and has done a lot of work in recent years to build player loyalty.
In hindsight, its complete rehaul of the game’s lore has payed dividends in increasing player loyalty and investment, asking them to read stories and maps to learn more about their favorite characters. The result is that the player’s bond with the world extends beyond the game itself. From there, players want to see more of their favorite characters in cinematics, shows, stories or other games — and wouldn’t you know it, now Riot has ticked all those boxes.
There is a notable success story of a developer dipping its feet into several wildly different genres — even moreso, exactly the genres that Riot is treading into:
Blizzard Entertainment.
Riot looks like it’s gunning for Blizzard’s throne, with its own offerings to directly compete with Diablo, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm (RIP), Hearthstone and probably others im forgetting about.
The difference is that Blizzard has had decades to climb up to its throne, and each of its landmark titles became hits largely independent of each other, with each new release having the support of a previously succesful one to back it.
While Riot has certainly had a long time — count 10 years — to build something similar, they are launching all these projects seemingly at once, and I wonder if it’s too much to support.
TFT has made a name for itself in a short time, but its yet to be seen if LoL, TFT and Legends of Runeterra can all coexist healthily. Add a first person shooter, fighter and dungeon crawler to the mix — all possibly released in the same year — and you have a lot of wildly different and complicated games competing for your audience’s attention.
Sure, LoL’s audience is beyond massive. But is it massive enough to support this level of growth in such a short period? I’m not so sure. Until Riot opens up a bit more about these projects, I’m remaining skeptical that every single project will thrive.
While the idea that Riot is a “small indie company” has become a joke in the LoL community, it’s still true in some sense. We’ve seen Riot stumble in places that Blizzard has not: namely, merchandising.
Riot’s merch store has been derided by fans for understocking items or simply not frequently offering new products or capitalizing on in-game events. Even at their live events, fans have found merch tables to be lacking. While Riot can keep players in-game and spending money to great success, I feel they’ve struggled to support their merchandising well enough to get players to spend money beyond the game. They simply don’t have the connections to merchandising that a deeply established company like Blizzard Entertainment does.
It may be a stretch to draw issues with merchandising out to not being able to support multiple game launches, but it still seems noteworthy.
In the end, as someone who plays LoL on a near-daily basis, I am extremely excited for these titles. I’m not sure if they’ll all thrive — or even survive — but I’m curious as both a player and someone interested in business and gaming news. I’ll be rewatching those teases of the fighting game for several weeks to come.
