Inc. Magazine named Riot Games its '16 Company of the Year, as the brand and its flagship "League of Legends" game took advantage of a year that saw media fragmentation start "wounding some long-impervious institutions," according to Blakely & Helm of INC. MAGAZINE. This year NFL viewership "fell by double digits," and ESPN "posted its biggest quarterly subscriber loss ever." League of Legends "provided a juggernaut of a counterexample." While League of Legends is "free to download and play, devotees can purchase extra characters -- champions, in LoL-speak -- and buy them virtual clothing, known as skins, and plenty of other decorative stuff." This year, those "virtual goods will yield" nearly $1.6B in sales for Riot. In '15, investors "swooped in to buy stakes in teams and purchase slots in the league to build their own squads." New League of Legends team owners include Monumental Sports & Entertainment Founder, Chair & CEO TED LEONSIS, Warriors co-Owner PETER GUBER and the 76ers ownership group. Each game League of Legends game "demands 30 to 60 minutes of players' undivided attention." The average player "spends 30 hours a month on the game -- that's three billion player-hours each month." Ten years ago, founders MARC MERRILL and BRANDON BECK "started building a business based on improving an online game they loved." Merrill: "Imagine we invented basketball, but we own every basketball court on earth, we sell you the shoes, and we built the NBA." As the world "continues to fragment and consumers spend more of their lives online, more gargantuan niches will rise up just like it." China-based tech firm Tencent Holdings offered $400M in early '11 for a 93% stake in Riot, and Merrill and Beck "accepted, persuading Tencent to let them operate independently." In December '15, Tencent "bought the remaining" 7% of the company for an "undisclosed sum." But Riot shows "little evidence of being wholly owned by another entity" (INC. MAGAZINE, 12/ '16 issue).
IT'S ALIVE: Beck said of keeping the game relevant and fresh, “A game can live for a long time. For a game like ‘League of Legends,’ it’s a competition. It is akin to sports where you invest a lot of time mastering and trying to master skills in the game and ultimately you get to express that with a bunch of real teammates against a bunch of real opponents. There is an almost infinite mastery curve in any sport and it is similar in certain types of games.” Merrill added, “We update the game frequently, adding new content and balancing the game to really keep it relevant. It’s a living, breathing game that evolves over time” (“Power Lunch,” CNBC, 11/29).
