Legends of Runeterra has flopped – especially financially. Ironically, what was supposed to set the game apart led to its downfall.
A few days ago, it was announced at Riot Games that over 500 developers had to leave. The team of “Legends of Runeterra”, the card game in the League of Legends universe, was particularly affected.
In the future, the game will be significantly smaller, the ranked mode will be put on hold, and monetization will be rethought considerably.
This was Legends of Runeterra: Legends of Runeterra (LoR) always presented itself as a fair card game. All players should have the same chance, and this shouldn’t depend on their wallets. Cards should always be generously available, and competitive differences should be determined solely by skill, not by the size of one’s wallet.
With this, LoR wanted to distinguish itself from other collectible card games, such as Blizzard’s Hearthstone. These games are often criticized for requiring players to invest hundreds of euros to have enough cards to compete at the top.
But the plan failed.
What was the problem? As the developers explained in an FAQ, Legends of Runeterra simply couldn’t generate enough revenue. While they tried to sell cosmetic items to players, such as special skins or battlefields, the plan failed. This was not a “close call” – it was miles away from the goal. Often, creating and developing the cosmetics was even more expensive than the revenue generated from them:
Sales for cosmetic items have proven to be significantly inadequate; they often cost us more to produce than we earned from them. (…) In the end, even if we had found a way to create [new types] of cosmetics, the gap between what they would likely generate and what they would have needed to generate to continue funding PvP was far too great to expect that from our players.
This is how LoR will continue: Legends of Runeterra will change in the coming months. While the PvP aspect will likely be put on hold for now, there will be more PvE content, which will also be monetized. When asked if monetization will be “stronger” in the future, they openly stated:
To be honest – Yes. Our team is now known to be smaller, and we will have more packages and monetization options at many different levels for the “Path of Champions” [the PvE part]. We want the game to grow and to do more cool things with Legends of Runeterra, but we need to sustain ourselves to cover these cool things.
In the future, there will likely be more opportunities in LoR to spend money in the game.
Missing China release was a major problem
One last significant point was the fact that LoR was never released in China – one of the potentially largest markets around.
The issue here was likely that the entire development of the game would have had to be paused for months to adapt LoR for the Chinese market. In China, games must adhere to very strict regulations to be approved – some content is removed or censored, and certain worldviews cannot be portrayed in the game.
This has been well known in the gaming world for years and occasionally leads to controversies, such as when trans characters are not represented as such in the Chinese version. Regarding LoR, it was only said:
We talked about releasing in China and put a lot of energy into making it possible after launch, but ultimately many circumstances prevented that from happening. (…) A major problem is that we couldn’t just send our current version of the game to the Chinese agencies for approval – we would have had to put a lot of work into changes, and we couldn’t afford to pause the game’s development for months. Ultimately, because restarting those efforts would have introduced a lot of uncertainty, we decided to focus on opportunities that had more impact on our existing players.
None of this seems to have helped. Even if LoR is not “dead”, it seems the game faces some tough months ahead, during which it will have to prove that a smaller team can bring the card game to success – and for that, players will ultimately have to dig deeper into their pockets.
