Legends of Runeterra flopped – especially financially. The very thing that was supposed to set the game apart from others now caused its downfall.
Riot Games announced a few days ago that over 500 developers had to leave. The team from “Legends of Runeterra”, the card game in the League of Legends cosmos, was particularly affected.
In the future, the game will be significantly smaller, the ranked mode will even be put on ice for the time being and the monetization will be significantly reconsidered.
This was Legends of Runeterra: Legends of Runeterra (LoR) has always presented itself as a fair card game. All players should have the same chance and this should not depend on their wallet. The cards should always be generously available and competitive differences should be decided solely by skill and not by the size of the wallet.
LoR also wanted to set itself apart from other trading card games, such as Blizzard’s Hearthstone. A criticism that is often raised about these games is that you often have to invest hundreds of euros in order to have enough cards to be able to play at the top.
But the plan failed.
What was the problem? As the developers explained in an FAQ, Legends of Runeterra simply couldn’t make enough money. They tried to sell players cosmetic items, such as special skins or battlefields, but the plan failed. It wasn’t a “close thing” – it was miles away from the goal. Often the creation and development of the cosmetics was even more expensive than what you subsequently earned from it:
Sales for cosmetic items have proven to be clearly inadequate; they often cost us more to produce than we earned from them. (…) Finally, even if we had found a way, [neue Arten] of Cosmetics, the difference between what they probably would have made and what they would have had to make to continue funding PvP was far too large to expect from our players.
This is how it continues with LoR: Legends of Runeterra will change in the coming months. While the PvP aspect will probably be put on hold for the time being, there should be more PvE again and that should then also be monetized. When asked whether monetization will be “stronger” in the future, one candidly says:
To be honest – yes. As we know, our team is now smaller and we will be introducing more packages and monetization options at many different levels for the Path of Champions. [den PvE-Anteil] have. We want the game to grow and do more cool things with Legends of Runeterra, but we need to sustain ourselves so we can pay for those cool things.
In the future, there should be more options in LoR to leave money in the game.
Lack of China release was a big problem
A final, significant point was the fact that LoR was never released in China – one of the potentially largest markets of all.
The problem here was probably that the entire development of the game would have had to be paused for months in order to adapt LoR for the Chinese market. In China, games have to follow very strict requirements in order to be approved at all – some content is deleted or censored and certain world views are not allowed to be represented in the game.
This has been known in the gaming world for years and occasionally causes a stir when, for example, trans characters in the Chinese version are not exactly that. LoR only said:
We talked about releasing in China and put a lot of effort into making it happen after launch, but in the end a lot of circumstances prevented that from happening. (…) A big 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 stop the game’s development for months . Ultimately, because restarting this effort would have introduced a large amount of uncertainty, we decided to focus on opportunities that had more impact on our existing players.”
It probably didn’t help at all. Even if LoR is not “dead”, the game is likely to have a tough few months ahead in which it has to show that a smaller team can now make the card game a success – and ultimately the players will have to dig deeper into their pockets.
We have introduced you to other good card games here.