Abilidebob
Member
Sure, but since 2015 at the very least, it has. I vaguely remember reading the number from 2014 and at 1st place on PC was Crossfire or Dungeon Fighter Online.
But since then LoL took up the top spot of revenue in the world.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Riot makes billions from LoL, but its president blames team owners for not investing.
- Thread starter Archie
- Start date
Sure, but since 2015 at the very least, it has. I vaguely remember reading the number from 2014 and at 1st place on PC was Crossfire or Dungeon Fighter Online.
But since then LoL took up the top spot of revenue in the world.
You are right, the 1bn+ is quite recent. But LoL is making bank for a long time now.
Evolution of Metal
Member
"Playerbase is up" Without daily or monthly active users, it can be misinterpreted as having more accounts than before. It is also important to take into account that China are way behind the curve and the truth is that the game is down in the west and up in the east. That is my explanation if the userbase is actually larger: the shrinking playerbase in the West is compensated by the increasing playerbase in China.
"Ranked participation is up" Bigger % of players are playing ranked, but we still don't know if they have more daily or monthly users.
And since we both agree that Dynamic Q is garbage, I think that many people would share the same perspective. It cannot destroy the game, but it certainly affected it in the long-term.
There is a good reason why I quit the game three years later. So many negative changes and Riot's inability to understand player needs is going to bite them in the ass eventually.
One thing to remember with retail and going on and on about big day one billion dollar sellers is that you get much less of a cut from retail compared to digital.
When Riot make $1.6b they are keeping most of it.
When Activions make $1b from CoD Ghosts they are getting about half, with the rest being eaten up by retailers, distribution and platform royalties.
Obviously doesn't change the fact that that amount of money was made, but it does mean that Riot are getting more out of it.
Horsemama1956
Member
What he saying is Valve somehow suckers people into buying shit with the direct purpose of funding their major tournaments, because they know many people who follow esports are also the type to spend $10 on an exclusive, rare texture.
Valve isn't "giving" anything to anyone. They "give" an amount that won't takeaway profits.
All of these companies are the same(Valve, Blizz, Riot etc). They know a big part of their market are susceptible to spending their money on worthless shit. They know people will buy the shittiest game because you can get achievements, people will buy a skin and charge a premium because it might only be available for 2 weeks.
There are people that buy games during the steam sale just to craft a fucking badge.. Valve and Blizz have just figured out how to take from consumers and somehow make it seem like they're on the consumers side doing it.
Valve's approach with giving the community a platform to make and sell content like skins or tournament tickets is pretty unique in the industry.
They don't do it only out of the goodness of their heart since they earn a lot of money doing it, but it's also pretty obvious why people that do fan/community work (and i'd put e-sports in that category) prefer that approach.
Overall the popularity bit is true, because there are many reports here and there that in Korea LoL is not #1 anymore. It starts to fall.
After all these stupid changes, releasing new patches before LCS matches (so training was for nothing), not supporting teams with enough money, bad prices for tournees etc. it doesn't surprise me. I played LoL for a half a year at the begining and the complete last year. It's fucked and the begining is still so slow.
I hope the popularity will decrease even further so that Riot will start to prioritize things a bit different.
dragonflys545
Member
Do you still need to buy heroes? If it is that's still the dumbest idea ever!
potatohead
Member
Lol yep XD
Lol I remember people calling doom in wow when ghostcrawler left and I was so happy. He spent years ruinning wow, his he is doing the same over at riot
Stone Ocean
Member
There are more players in the ranked ladder period, not just a percentage.Check this thread out, Playerbase isn't really shrinking as its getting a more stable growth in existing servers and new servers like JP are being added while smaller servers like BR are growing. And then there's China.
The reality is that most players don't give a fuck about high ELO Dynamic Q woes, it's changed next to nothing for them while allowing people to play with their friends. Do any of Riot's actions make it seem like they are worried about anything? They are improving Dynamic Q to make Challenger more competitive but they are also keeping it for a reason. Will Riot's desire to solve problems that don't really exist and not solving problems that could be easily fixed break the game in the long run? Perhaps, but this is certainly not it.
The only metric we have is PC bangs and though Overwatch took a bite of the marketshare League is still #1.
Doesn't change the fact that Riot just fucks up. I hope this gets bigger and bigger.
People keep saying the Dynamic Queue feedback is only "High ELO" people- that's not true in the least, and it's really not going to stop. People don't like getting paired into a 5 stack as a solo- even if the game is "even", it still feels awful to players, no matter their skill level.
HOTS removed their ranked Dynamic queue system due to massive unhappiness with it- the thing they massively screwed up on was not having unranked Dynamic Queue ready to roll out the instant they made the switch.
I've heard the logic for the move was that they wanted to make it easier for people to play with their friends and thus retain more users due to social inertia, but I don't know that I see "wants to play ranked" and "wants to play with friends" as two things with a lot of natural overlap.
That was another thing that got brought up.
Monte, a big lol freelance caster has stated that Riot pays their own casters much less then the rest of esports pay their casters.
He said two weeks of the Dota 2 international last year was worth as much as 6 months of LCS casting for riot casters.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AjFCS0WxJO4 where he talks about it
As far as similarities. They already produced documentaries on each teams like riot does. But beyond that they also had nice features at this year's international: boohts,(?) at hero projections during the drafting phase, all star match with fans being able to play with pro players, concert. All these off the top of my head. There's literally nothing riot does better production-wise currently. And this isn't hyperbole. Anyone who watched the international and compare it to worlds can tell you that
eot
Banned
I don't know, but it's not an implausible number when they claim to have something like 30 million unique players per day, and get 20 mil viewers for some tournaments. They also say 70 ish mil unique monthly players, compared to 12(?) for DotA2. We know that DotA2 peaks at about 1 mil players, so then 6 mil for LoL seems reasonable.
Adding onto this, having attended two Internationals, you can really tell Valve has mastered running these things. TI5 had some hiccups with a DDoS going on for a bit, but they were able to get it smootly after about two hours.
TI6 was damn near flawless, as they were able to step it up above even TI5. They had entertainment bits in the downtime between games (no matter what peoples' opinions on SirActionSlacks are, it was entertaining and passed time between games without having the panel talk the whole time). For the last four years of TI, they have had Kaci Aitchison, a professional newscaster from the local Seattle Fox station doing player interviews, and lighthearted comedy bits. She is extremely professional in all of them, and it is amazing to see how she went to knowing almost nothing about Dota in TI3, but still handling everything professionally, to actually knowing some of Dota now and still able to up the professionalism.
There were the concerts mentioned, they had Lindsey Stirling as well as a live orchestra. There was even a special performance one night with a martial arts routine to announce a new hero.
Abilidebob
Member
Good casters are pretty important to e-sport scenes, that's kinda sad.
I haven't played LoL in 5 years or so, so I don't have a horse in this race, but it's my understanding that LoL has been huge for some time now, and that the eSports side of it has grown with it. I don't think the narrative of Riot being blindsided by their sudden success fits given that Lol has been one the biggest games on the planet for years now.
The top 50 esports earners are all Dota 2 players
A game made by 3 dudes at Valve and updated once a year
This is not a positive when you consider all that that entails.
Being on salary means they just get paid a flat amount regardless of how many events they work. It also means they can't take side jobs casting other games(or non Riot LoL tournaments, if there were any
), can't run/monetize their own streams/youtube channel, etc.That doesnt necessarily make it a healthy esport.
Abilidebob
Member
Sure, but didn't that whole thing kinda started because players and casters are complaining about the scene?
Similar threads
- Locked