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by Pxtl 4760 days ago
On the other hand, you can't really blame Riot for needing to grab more money than Valve. Valve has deep pockets and is willing to take a small profit if it means they survive in the long run. Also, Valve's brand is strong-enough that they have players beating a path to their door no matter what they publish. Riot has none of these options. Every player they earn on the strength and reputation of the game alone. They have no cash to fall back onto if LoL doesn't make money for them.

If LoL doesn't make money for Riot, the developers don't get to eat. So yeah, I'm not surprised they went with a F2P model with a little bit of pay-to-win in there, and their variation on it (rotating characters and you pay to keep the ones you liked) is a novel and fair approach to it.
4 comments
sardonicbryan 4760 days ago
Riot is now part of Tencent, which has a market cap of about $90B.

http://allthingsd.com/20110204/chinas-tencent-buys-riot-game...

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=0700.HK

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chc 4760 days ago
I'm not sure what you mean for us to infer from this. Riot is owned by Tencent, but that doesn't mean Tencent is willing to take a temporary loss on Riot like Valve is willing to do with Dota 2.
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jmyc 4760 days ago
> On the other hand, you can't really blame Riot...

Of course not, they are free to employ whichever model they want. I think his reply was more directed at the statement: "I think League of Legends or maybe Team Fortress 2 are about as good as it gets..."

LoL is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of "purely cosmetic" and "pay to win" while Dota 2 is on the "purely cosmetic" end. So in the category of Dota-like games, Dota 2 is perhaps as good at it gets, in terms of its free-to-play model.

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War_Machine 4760 days ago
Who says Valve doesn't make a lot of profit from Dota 2?

My guess is that Riot simply didn't bother changing the model they went for in the first place for LoL, but I think Dota 2 has proved to be a great business model for Valve.

I'll be fair, I haven't seen any numbers from Valve, but if you pay any attention to the selling and trading of TF2 and Dota 2 items on Steam and many other places, you'd notice that people are outright making a living out of the whole Steam ecosystem.

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anonymoushn 4760 days ago
S2 apparently does not need to sell HoN heroes to stay in business, though they did sell the game for a while.
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chc 4760 days ago
> S2 apparently does not need to sell HoN heroes to stay in business

That remains to be seen. Do we even know if HoN is profitable? My impression is that League of Legends is the only MOBA to turn a profit so far, but I could be mistaken. Based on how drastically they've altered the game and the changing business models, I certainly didn't get the impression that S2 was satisfied with HoN's returns.

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