Eleven years ago, Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill, realized their dream of starting their own video game company by opening the doors of Riot Games. Three years later they launched their first, and so far only, game "League of Legends." Since then, over the last eight years, "League of Legends" has grown to have a reported 100 million monthly players worldwide, and has redefined the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre. However, in the last eight years, nothing new has come out of Riot Games. But, all that is reportedly about to change.
Riot Games new direction
Last Wednesday the Riot Games founders Beck and Merrill announced, via a blog post on their company website, they would be "actively changing our roles to be much more focused on games again." Beck and Merrill have officially handed the reigns of company operations over to CFO Dylan Jadeja, CTO Scott Gelb, and President Nicolo Laurent, who's twitter bio now states he is, "transforming Riot Games into a multi-games publisher."
What type of game, however, has yet to be announced. In March of last year, Riot Games bought the fighting game company Radiant Entertainment, the company responsible Evo, the biggest fighting game tournament in the world. Much like "League of Legends," Radiant Entertainment's game Rising Thunder was designed with the intention to make it easier for players unfamiliar with the fighting genre to pick up and play.
This could lead to a new fighting game from Riot Games, but no word as of yet on anything.
'League of Legends'
"League of Legends" is classified as a MOBA, which is a genre of video games where players each control one champion on one of two teams trying to destroy the other team's base. The game is a PC game for both Microsoft Windows and macOS.
There are currently three game modes for play: Summoner's Rift, The Twisted Treeline, and Howling Abyss. The fourth game mode, The Crystal Scar, has been removed. The game centers around two teams of either three or five champions, battling to destroy each other's bases. The game currently features six roles for champions: Assassin, Fighter, Mage, Support, Tank, and Marksman, and roughly 134 champions to choose from.
In its eight years "League of Legends" has grown to a monthly player list of roughly 100 million players, and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. Riot Games even released a board game last year titled "Mechs vs. Minions" a spin-off of "League of Legends."
There is no news yet on what type of game, or when a new game will be announced from Riot Games, but with the success of "League of Legends" there is little doubt as to what fans can look forward to.
