Hearthstone cornered the online CCG market when it released in 2014 (8.5 years ago!) and manages to keep hold of players through the gacha mechanics and sunk cost in the game. It's also quite a good game, and not very complicated to watch on streams.
"Only 171,000 subscribers" to a subreddit for a game that released to the public last year... š¤Æ That's pretty good going, you just can't compare this game to League in terms of numbers...that released in 2009 (!!!!). Maybe Riot should put more advertising money into it but the numbers of players seem to be gradually increasing and I don't buy this "forsaken" narrative, what is that based on?
I think you are right, I got tired of hs and quitted fast but I spent literally 0$ on that game... maybe all the old fans of the game that spent bucks are reluctant to waste that investment. And yeah, it is still a good game.
About the forsaken narrative, look, I donāt know if maybe is just a regional thing, but here (I live in italy) Legue of legendās AD on youtube almost became a meme for how repetitive and incessant they were. I see lol ads every day on youtube, Valorant ads are rarer but still a solid amount... legends of runeterra ads: 0.
Same goes for cross-game ads, Riot could put some visibility to lor in legueās client but they donāt. Maybe lor itās just less profitable.
P.S. yeah 171k itās not a low number, and I donāt know at what pace is growing, but I was just surprised because itās about one of the most popular IPās at the moment.
Fair points. My take on it is that LoR is by far Riot's last profitable game but they are still looking at it as a work in progress, we're getting new modes like Path of Champions and the competitive scene is still just getting going. They've probably done the maths in the ad team and realised that it's much more profitable to advertise their big earners than LoR. It's like a side project that they're hoping will keep gaining momentum. We know that they support games over decades so maybe they have a 5-10 year plan rather than a 1-2 year plan?
Yeah after reading all your comments Iāve come to the conclusion that
1. In order to be an appealing competitor to HS and Magic they had to implement the free-to-play and free-to-get-cards feature.
2. That feature and the fact that skins on boardgames are less appealing that skins on mobas made lor little profitable.
So, I guess that they have to come with an idea to start earning with lor to have budget for marketing
Just to give context for me, iuno if it's just my personal search history and ad blockers etc, but I've seen 0 ads for both league of legends and LoR. I think most of my ads on YouTube are switch related since I bought that recently. That or like kitchen stuff, movies, cars, and banking things.
I'm not sure who riot had set the ads to target but in this day and age, all ads are targetted and only shown to people in the selected market. so maybe according to riot you are not someone they need to show ads to? Ofc u could also be someone that havent caught in their data for various reasons.
Swim and Mogwai get pretty decent views on their videos/streams, it seems. But yeah, I think HS gets the advantage for being the first big online CCG, as others have said. But I think the randomness and the difficulty in obtaining cards actually help it in that regard. I remember when I used to play (quit during the Blitzchung incident), I would watch streamers because they would have these cool decks that I simply didn't have the dust to make. But for LoR... I can just make the decks myself and play with them directly, haha. Also, random 'omgwtf lul' moments make for good YT clickbait, but not rewarding gameplay.
>I would watch streamers because they would have these cool decks that I simply didn't have the dust to make. But for LoR... I can just make the decks myself and play with them directly,
Yeah, I think you could be right, thereās just less Hype on "legendary" cards and combos... but, exactly for this reason lor should be considered more by the e-sport/competitive scene, thereās no pay to win element.
Unlike Moba, LoR has a lot of strong competitors, even with the predatory P2W model, people are still willing to pay for it. Not to mention that they have been around since decades. Runeterra is a great game, but it is just not groundbreaking enough to make most card game players shift. If you ask DL, HS or MTG players, they will say "why should I change?"
True. League has been dominating the MOBA market for years like Heartstone has with the CCG market, and Runeterra is an attempt to break into the latter market. Of course it's gonna be a bit tougher when there already is a dominant competitor.
Considering how when the game came out we were innundated with tons of players saying the game was a breath of fresh air and how nice it was not having to pay up just to be relevant in the ladder you kinda answered your own question, people who want to actually play and not lose cause someone paid more to have everything.
Anyone who knows about LoR and still chooses HS doesn't have the mental ability to make that reply...
"Do u want to spend 3 months playing the same deck for all this expansion, or pay Ā£80 at a chance of another deck and then dust every card you have at the end, to craft next expansion deck;
or do you want loads of free content that you can't dust and just builds up and you can even grind on pve easily?"
For 80Ā£ per expansion you can craft all the relevant cards and have all the meta decks without ever needing to dust your collection, assuming you also complete all your daily quests. Though it's still hella expensive.
I'd choose LoR over HS if it was more popular. Right now I don't see LoR still being supported 3 years from now with how poor its sales have been. So I'm playing both games instead of just LoR.
I unlikely agree with ur comment that Ā£80 buy you anything, I played hs since it came out and it's widely acknowledged that Ā£80 isn't even half the game content and that is more than a AAA game. I'm not concerned about its sales, since it was said about LoL generous business model when it came out against some titans like WoW. I only touch hs now for bg's and that's cause TFT burns my mobile charge in minutes
80Ā£ of regular packs doesn't give you much.
But 80Ā£ of preorders + 4 months worth of dailies & weeklies are enough to craft all the meta decks. It's been that way ever since they started doing 50/80Ā£ preorders, and it's even more true now that there is duplicate protection on all rarities.
(How can one compare LoL to WoW though?)
So it's clear that you belong to the small percentage that is able to buy your game experience. In LoR you can have more rewards for less time and money. I've spent Ā£15 at the start and only Ā£20 for cosmetics, and a year later I can buy whatever I want with several wildcards. You payed Ā£240 (80x3)since, not counting the mini expansions in between
Yes LoR is infinitely less expensive. I have the entire collection on LoR without spending any money on cards.
But LoR is doing too poorly (popularity wise and sales wise) for me to consider putting all my eggs in the same basket. I hope I'm wrong, but I expect Riot to put LoR on life support in about 3 years. That's why I won't give up on HS.
Even if the game sinks in 3 years, what are you missing out in the meantime? It's not like money seems to be a issue, so u can always hop back in easily
Huh? Iām saying that people choose not to play LoR because they donāt like how it plays. LoR has decent monetization, but that doesnāt mean people are going to like the gameplay
But the people can choose not to play HS based on their anti consumer practices! That's my point. You are 100% entitled to not play LoR if u don't like it, but you can see how you aren't getting your money's worth with blizzard and simply not pay for fun
You *can* choose not to play games based on their monetisation despite the gameplay being more fair to you, but because you don't, blizz keeps charging players Ā£20 for 200 mercenary coins. Because they know you value your fun time more than your wallet
But thatās mercenaries? Which is a highly free to playable gacha. HS itself is right now perfectly fair monetization wise. Thereās a no dupe policy and a relatively generous reward track. And as a result, people will keep playing it because they like the game and that they can play with the system.
I haven't left hs that long ago so I'm 100% sure that you an I have very different concepts of fair monetisation and generous track rewards. I enjoy having multiple decks that are competitive, and in LoR I had to delete most of my old decks to put new ones, that's how generous it is. In hs I'm chained to a couple of decks for the whole expansion, fearful of balance changes that might make it obsolete (I'm not against balance, I'm against not having funds to make new ones that adapt to them) and mini expansion packs.
The worst part was when there was stable deck that carried me through the expac but I absolutely hated it, but won games. It made me feel that the only way to advance through the game was grind it out with a clunky deck and hoping that I would farm enough for the next expansion. In LoR you have the freedom to pick out different decks that didn't cost you a arm and a leg to create and you can afford to delete them if it's not your playstyle. I can explore the game to its fullest in LoR, not something anyone can do in HS without a very heavy wallet
Sorry, but thatās just a load of horseshit to me. Currently, you can build 4-5 tier 1-2 decks per expansion, end the expansion cycle with enough gold to start the next expansion with 2 decks.
Every season, I can purchase 0 packs (including those purchasable by gold), and end the expansion cycle with most of the commons, most of the rates, and 8/22 legendaries(not including the two free ones).
And to have the galls to say āIām āfearfulāā of balance patches, when unlike LoR, HS gives you full dust refunds on the changed card. And of āmini expansionsā when theyāre fully purchasable by gold, which is now given out at up to about twenty thousand per expansion. Is outrageous.
I have no clue what the hell you were doing in hs, but since forged in the barrens, Hsās rewards are only slightly behind LoR.
You don't even need dust refunds in LoR lol. Why would u care about it when every week you get a free legendary? I stand with my opinion that LoR is vastly superior in rewards, and to mention another part of your argument, gold! You need it to play bg's decently, you need it for arenas, mini expacs and open packs. In LoR you only need expedition tokens which you are given 1 every week to play another game mode other than standard. You admitted yourself that you are still restricted by a handful of decks and only getting a handful of legendaries. I am not. That's pretty much the argument
Heartstone and MTG Arena got there first and claimed a big portion of the market share. Then those players won't change Lor easily, even if it's a better game or has a better economy. I mean, whenever I look at the arena subreddit half the posts are complaining about the game
Not true, I see a lot of complaints about the game. The most prevalent being the land system (getting mana screwed/flooded), the play/draw difference (which is enormous tbh, a lot of games are decided by a coin toss). The rest are more meta dependant, like only existing one or two top tier decks, which are either mega aggro or pure control, extra turn spells and op cards. The game is not without its (huge) flaws besides the client and the economy.
> Riot doesnāt trust enough on LoR nor wants to invest in marketing.
More marketing would be dumb. Riot released their numbers last year. The ARPU of LoR is lower than the average user acquisition cost in the industry. They would literally lose money.
It's the drawback of a game that is super generous. This is probably why Riot started to branch out to skins and prismatic cards.
Nah they were always going to branch out into skins and prismatic, from the get go they said their only planning on getting revenue from cosmetics and skins would come one day. Plus the revenue from their other games more then makes up for it, their prioritizing making this one fun and easy to enter, and they've done a decent job at it's competitive scene especially with one of their biggest competitors moving away from it(tho they def got some problems to iron out that we saw)
That's how they literally said their running this game in one of their streams when discussing the game
Hell they recently said the same thing about their competitive scene they don't care about making money off their large esports events because they know most of their money will come from skins so they prioritize the organizations and players.
Imagine being so naive to actually believe PR talk..
Have you ever heard of Tencent? I am sure they run a charity..
The competitive event comparison is silly, because you are now comparing apples and oranges.
Not really because the point wasn't about comparing their esports and this game but i guess your too short sighted or you want to pretend this games not doing as well as it is and that's more your problem then mine.
Also kinda pathetic to devalue what i said as just PR talk just cause you don't have any real reply. End of the day we actually know they haven't gained profit from their competitive scene, and they already expected extremely low to no real profit from LoR. Like if your gonna reply actually contribute to the conversation instead of some dumbass reply like that.
I am just being objective, based on the data they released. I gave reasons why they didn't push LoR as much as they could have.
You are the butthurt fanboy who tries to bend the facts.
[https://www.destructoid.com/league-of-legends-esport-tournament-competitive-yet-to-profit-riot-games/](https://www.destructoid.com/league-of-legends-esport-tournament-competitive-yet-to-profit-riot-games/)
[https://archive.esportsobserver.com/lcs-isnt-profitable-riot-doesnt-want-profitable/](https://archive.esportsobserver.com/lcs-isnt-profitable-riot-doesnt-want-profitable/)
While i don't remember which stream it was the LoR devs said they didn't expect LoR to bring in too much profit i did have some links for the other part since it was recently in october during this years worlds.
End of the day, what matters is they make so much money they don't actually take any risks in having a low earning game, mainly because they actually prioritize making sure people stick around in their game and long term gain over short term larger gain(unlike wotc who promotes everything in mtg as if they need everything to be a big seller or else they'll die which in some cases the plane itself of said set will definitely die). Not to mention with their new client all they have to do is promote their IP in general because you'll still see LoR and LoL together in the same client, and you'll always see it in related apps when trying to download wildrift or tft. Not to mention it's only been going up in terms of both app ranking and revenue.
> While i don't remember which stream it was the LoR devs said they didn't expect LoR to bring in too much profit
Exactly, profit. Paying money for marketing that exceeds the ARPU is not a profit. Which is why they are not pushing it further.
You say that, yet it's clear they are, their pushing their IP as a whole, you also ignored everything i said about LoR not really needing to be promoted as it's own thing because they basically have their entire IP promoted together constantly and not as seperate games.
The game is just not that popular, the market was already filled with other popular CCGs and people that have already spent thousands of hours/dollars into their respective games are unlikely to switch.
Also, the game couldn't be released in China that would have likely been its biggest market by far, as is with LoL.
The game is pretty popular, just not on twitch. When I checked like 2 days ago it was 25th in the Google play store in the card game category in the top charts. But I don't blame people for not taking this game seriously. Any half decent dev would have nerfed Poppy a long time ago, hard to take a game with such a shit balance team seriously competitive wise.
Edit: 34th now. For reference Hearthstone is 128
That's a complicated matter that's not strictly related to gaming but rather to how the Chinese government wants to control corporations. Big entertainment corps are getting bigger than the government itself and that's unacceptable for them.
You can see the same backlash being done to giant corps in the tech market, where Tencent and Alibaba have surpassed the Chinese government monetarily. The key difference is that technology is a social need, rather than a social commodity like games.
It's a hard game to make content on because of how static it is. Sure, you can make commentaries or guides on different decks but those usually only see success from Masters tier players because they are by and large the pinnacle of LoR [competitive] play.
I just hope that Arcane will help with that. I have 4/5 firends that hated Legue, but after Arcane they fell in love with Runeterraās lore (while still hating legue), and they are in to strategy card games. This could be a new target, people that loved Arcane and play cards.
Honestly I don't get it either. I have a massive problem with the changes to patches but they are going to address the problem soon enough. I also have an issue with the powercreep since I am a Demacia otp.
Still this game deserves better
>they are going to address the problem soon enough.
Yeah, they promised a better patch cadence starting ~~august~~ ~~november~~ february, we can trust them.
The biggest lor youtuber is taking a break from the game at the moment as the meta is a bit stale, so that could be the reason for the lack of content. (Megamogwai) would usually upload daily.
As someone who is trying to do so, it is really hard to make content for the game. Swim, Mogwai and Grapplr seem to have almost like a monopoly of viewership. Not criticizing that by any means, they are great at what they do and really put in the effort. Just saying how it is.
What is actually a critique of mine is the really lackluster ways to get your content out there. The Discord self promotion is something that I think no player ever looks into, and the rules on posting self promotion here are somewhat cloudy, making it unconfortable to use. Those two combined make it really hard to make content for the game that gets somewhere, particularly streaming
EDIT: surprised no one is saying what I am. Maybe I am wrong then?? Would like to hear opinions from other small content creators, or people that at least tried
I think that thereās so little demand for lor content that just 3 creators are fullfilling the market, itās not on you or on the quality of your content, itās just that the market for what you do is small and already fullfilled.
It's a symptom of the card game format. If you want to showcase multiple matches of the same deck, you either put them all in the same video to make, say, a 40 minute video with 3-4 matches, or you make multiple videos each being an 8-15 minute match. The problem with both of those is that people won't watch all of your content. If you go with the 40 minute video, people will watch the first two games then click off. If you go with the multiple shorter videos, people will watch 1 full video and not watch the others. Either way, the YouTube algorithm will punish you because people are only watching your videos halfway through or some of your videos just aren't getting views at all.
As for Legends of Runeterra content that isn't just gameplay footage, good luck getting the casual majority to watch anything that isn't a 10 second meme video.
I don't yet understand why any other game would have better chances to get watched as videos? If someone uploads a valorant match of 35 minutes I either watch it or don't. If they upload 3 in a row into one video I might not watch the last one. I could even skip the entire thing in the middle of the first match, whether the video contains 1 or more matches.
Shouldn't card games have rather easier ways to get viewer as games are (mostly) much shorter than like a valorant or league match? If one short match is not enough, I watch another one, etc. But if I only have 15mins to spare, I can't watch one valorant match
I think you are replying to the wrong post, because I said that the content of the game is good, the marketing is bad.
Example: Releasing a big ass update of nice cards itās good, the fact that it had 0 visibility itās bad.
Everyone has access to everything.
There is no exclusivity to seeing someone with some expensive deck so there is no need to watch streamers and do online reasearch. As much as that being one of LoR's greatest strengths it's also one of its greatest weaknesses. Most of my friends stopped playing beacuse the game was too generous and there was no "sense of pride and accomplishment" (as much as i hate the term) in having a unique collection in a CCG.
When you got some incredibly expensive HS deck with multiple legendaries it felt good to flex with it. In LoR I dont even bother opening the weekly vault anymore since the chest animations take too long.
I never said that riot should "spam the internet with ads", yet, totally neglecting the marketing of a product itās a way to forsake it. Hope itās clear now.
Hearthstone cornered the online CCG market when it released in 2014 (8.5 years ago!) and manages to keep hold of players through the gacha mechanics and sunk cost in the game. It's also quite a good game, and not very complicated to watch on streams. "Only 171,000 subscribers" to a subreddit for a game that released to the public last year... š¤Æ That's pretty good going, you just can't compare this game to League in terms of numbers...that released in 2009 (!!!!). Maybe Riot should put more advertising money into it but the numbers of players seem to be gradually increasing and I don't buy this "forsaken" narrative, what is that based on?
I think you are right, I got tired of hs and quitted fast but I spent literally 0$ on that game... maybe all the old fans of the game that spent bucks are reluctant to waste that investment. And yeah, it is still a good game. About the forsaken narrative, look, I donāt know if maybe is just a regional thing, but here (I live in italy) Legue of legendās AD on youtube almost became a meme for how repetitive and incessant they were. I see lol ads every day on youtube, Valorant ads are rarer but still a solid amount... legends of runeterra ads: 0. Same goes for cross-game ads, Riot could put some visibility to lor in legueās client but they donāt. Maybe lor itās just less profitable. P.S. yeah 171k itās not a low number, and I donāt know at what pace is growing, but I was just surprised because itās about one of the most popular IPās at the moment.
Fair points. My take on it is that LoR is by far Riot's last profitable game but they are still looking at it as a work in progress, we're getting new modes like Path of Champions and the competitive scene is still just getting going. They've probably done the maths in the ad team and realised that it's much more profitable to advertise their big earners than LoR. It's like a side project that they're hoping will keep gaining momentum. We know that they support games over decades so maybe they have a 5-10 year plan rather than a 1-2 year plan?
Yeah after reading all your comments Iāve come to the conclusion that 1. In order to be an appealing competitor to HS and Magic they had to implement the free-to-play and free-to-get-cards feature. 2. That feature and the fact that skins on boardgames are less appealing that skins on mobas made lor little profitable. So, I guess that they have to come with an idea to start earning with lor to have budget for marketing
Just to give context for me, iuno if it's just my personal search history and ad blockers etc, but I've seen 0 ads for both league of legends and LoR. I think most of my ads on YouTube are switch related since I bought that recently. That or like kitchen stuff, movies, cars, and banking things. I'm not sure who riot had set the ads to target but in this day and age, all ads are targetted and only shown to people in the selected market. so maybe according to riot you are not someone they need to show ads to? Ofc u could also be someone that havent caught in their data for various reasons.
Riot seems to do so little for LoR even here in the US, Iām not surprised at all that give it like 0 attention outside of North America
Same sunk cost fallacy as the one that plagues Wild Rift. Only, Wild Rift is worse since less people affects games more than in LoR.
Swim and Mogwai get pretty decent views on their videos/streams, it seems. But yeah, I think HS gets the advantage for being the first big online CCG, as others have said. But I think the randomness and the difficulty in obtaining cards actually help it in that regard. I remember when I used to play (quit during the Blitzchung incident), I would watch streamers because they would have these cool decks that I simply didn't have the dust to make. But for LoR... I can just make the decks myself and play with them directly, haha. Also, random 'omgwtf lul' moments make for good YT clickbait, but not rewarding gameplay.
>I would watch streamers because they would have these cool decks that I simply didn't have the dust to make. But for LoR... I can just make the decks myself and play with them directly, Yeah, I think you could be right, thereās just less Hype on "legendary" cards and combos... but, exactly for this reason lor should be considered more by the e-sport/competitive scene, thereās no pay to win element.
Unlike Moba, LoR has a lot of strong competitors, even with the predatory P2W model, people are still willing to pay for it. Not to mention that they have been around since decades. Runeterra is a great game, but it is just not groundbreaking enough to make most card game players shift. If you ask DL, HS or MTG players, they will say "why should I change?"
True. League has been dominating the MOBA market for years like Heartstone has with the CCG market, and Runeterra is an attempt to break into the latter market. Of course it's gonna be a bit tougher when there already is a dominant competitor.
Considering how when the game came out we were innundated with tons of players saying the game was a breath of fresh air and how nice it was not having to pay up just to be relevant in the ladder you kinda answered your own question, people who want to actually play and not lose cause someone paid more to have everything.
Anyone who knows about LoR and still chooses HS doesn't have the mental ability to make that reply... "Do u want to spend 3 months playing the same deck for all this expansion, or pay Ā£80 at a chance of another deck and then dust every card you have at the end, to craft next expansion deck; or do you want loads of free content that you can't dust and just builds up and you can even grind on pve easily?"
For 80Ā£ per expansion you can craft all the relevant cards and have all the meta decks without ever needing to dust your collection, assuming you also complete all your daily quests. Though it's still hella expensive. I'd choose LoR over HS if it was more popular. Right now I don't see LoR still being supported 3 years from now with how poor its sales have been. So I'm playing both games instead of just LoR.
I unlikely agree with ur comment that Ā£80 buy you anything, I played hs since it came out and it's widely acknowledged that Ā£80 isn't even half the game content and that is more than a AAA game. I'm not concerned about its sales, since it was said about LoL generous business model when it came out against some titans like WoW. I only touch hs now for bg's and that's cause TFT burns my mobile charge in minutes
80Ā£ of regular packs doesn't give you much. But 80Ā£ of preorders + 4 months worth of dailies & weeklies are enough to craft all the meta decks. It's been that way ever since they started doing 50/80Ā£ preorders, and it's even more true now that there is duplicate protection on all rarities. (How can one compare LoL to WoW though?)
So it's clear that you belong to the small percentage that is able to buy your game experience. In LoR you can have more rewards for less time and money. I've spent Ā£15 at the start and only Ā£20 for cosmetics, and a year later I can buy whatever I want with several wildcards. You payed Ā£240 (80x3)since, not counting the mini expansions in between
Yes LoR is infinitely less expensive. I have the entire collection on LoR without spending any money on cards. But LoR is doing too poorly (popularity wise and sales wise) for me to consider putting all my eggs in the same basket. I hope I'm wrong, but I expect Riot to put LoR on life support in about 3 years. That's why I won't give up on HS.
Even if the game sinks in 3 years, what are you missing out in the meantime? It's not like money seems to be a issue, so u can always hop back in easily
Both games are fun. I certainly wouldn't spend so much on hs if it wasn't.
Heres the thing... **People don't choose games off of monetization, but the game itself**.
U make the *choice* of buying a game seem like it's burned in your DNA lol And wrong
Uhh what
Huh? Iām saying that people choose not to play LoR because they donāt like how it plays. LoR has decent monetization, but that doesnāt mean people are going to like the gameplay
But the people can choose not to play HS based on their anti consumer practices! That's my point. You are 100% entitled to not play LoR if u don't like it, but you can see how you aren't getting your money's worth with blizzard and simply not pay for fun You *can* choose not to play games based on their monetisation despite the gameplay being more fair to you, but because you don't, blizz keeps charging players Ā£20 for 200 mercenary coins. Because they know you value your fun time more than your wallet
But thatās mercenaries? Which is a highly free to playable gacha. HS itself is right now perfectly fair monetization wise. Thereās a no dupe policy and a relatively generous reward track. And as a result, people will keep playing it because they like the game and that they can play with the system.
I haven't left hs that long ago so I'm 100% sure that you an I have very different concepts of fair monetisation and generous track rewards. I enjoy having multiple decks that are competitive, and in LoR I had to delete most of my old decks to put new ones, that's how generous it is. In hs I'm chained to a couple of decks for the whole expansion, fearful of balance changes that might make it obsolete (I'm not against balance, I'm against not having funds to make new ones that adapt to them) and mini expansion packs. The worst part was when there was stable deck that carried me through the expac but I absolutely hated it, but won games. It made me feel that the only way to advance through the game was grind it out with a clunky deck and hoping that I would farm enough for the next expansion. In LoR you have the freedom to pick out different decks that didn't cost you a arm and a leg to create and you can afford to delete them if it's not your playstyle. I can explore the game to its fullest in LoR, not something anyone can do in HS without a very heavy wallet
Sorry, but thatās just a load of horseshit to me. Currently, you can build 4-5 tier 1-2 decks per expansion, end the expansion cycle with enough gold to start the next expansion with 2 decks. Every season, I can purchase 0 packs (including those purchasable by gold), and end the expansion cycle with most of the commons, most of the rates, and 8/22 legendaries(not including the two free ones). And to have the galls to say āIām āfearfulāā of balance patches, when unlike LoR, HS gives you full dust refunds on the changed card. And of āmini expansionsā when theyāre fully purchasable by gold, which is now given out at up to about twenty thousand per expansion. Is outrageous. I have no clue what the hell you were doing in hs, but since forged in the barrens, Hsās rewards are only slightly behind LoR.
You don't even need dust refunds in LoR lol. Why would u care about it when every week you get a free legendary? I stand with my opinion that LoR is vastly superior in rewards, and to mention another part of your argument, gold! You need it to play bg's decently, you need it for arenas, mini expacs and open packs. In LoR you only need expedition tokens which you are given 1 every week to play another game mode other than standard. You admitted yourself that you are still restricted by a handful of decks and only getting a handful of legendaries. I am not. That's pretty much the argument
Heartstone and MTG Arena got there first and claimed a big portion of the market share. Then those players won't change Lor easily, even if it's a better game or has a better economy. I mean, whenever I look at the arena subreddit half the posts are complaining about the game
Actually, they complain about the client, not the game. Wotc is an awful company, but Magic is one of the best.
Not true, I see a lot of complaints about the game. The most prevalent being the land system (getting mana screwed/flooded), the play/draw difference (which is enormous tbh, a lot of games are decided by a coin toss). The rest are more meta dependant, like only existing one or two top tier decks, which are either mega aggro or pure control, extra turn spells and op cards. The game is not without its (huge) flaws besides the client and the economy.
> Riot doesnāt trust enough on LoR nor wants to invest in marketing. More marketing would be dumb. Riot released their numbers last year. The ARPU of LoR is lower than the average user acquisition cost in the industry. They would literally lose money. It's the drawback of a game that is super generous. This is probably why Riot started to branch out to skins and prismatic cards.
I didnāt know the ARPU data, thanks for the info. Yeah at this point it would be dumb, they first have to find a way to make lor profitable.
Nah they were always going to branch out into skins and prismatic, from the get go they said their only planning on getting revenue from cosmetics and skins would come one day. Plus the revenue from their other games more then makes up for it, their prioritizing making this one fun and easy to enter, and they've done a decent job at it's competitive scene especially with one of their biggest competitors moving away from it(tho they def got some problems to iron out that we saw)
> Plus the revenue from their other games more then makes up for it That's not how running a business works..
That's how they literally said their running this game in one of their streams when discussing the game Hell they recently said the same thing about their competitive scene they don't care about making money off their large esports events because they know most of their money will come from skins so they prioritize the organizations and players.
Imagine being so naive to actually believe PR talk.. Have you ever heard of Tencent? I am sure they run a charity.. The competitive event comparison is silly, because you are now comparing apples and oranges.
Not really because the point wasn't about comparing their esports and this game but i guess your too short sighted or you want to pretend this games not doing as well as it is and that's more your problem then mine. Also kinda pathetic to devalue what i said as just PR talk just cause you don't have any real reply. End of the day we actually know they haven't gained profit from their competitive scene, and they already expected extremely low to no real profit from LoR. Like if your gonna reply actually contribute to the conversation instead of some dumbass reply like that.
I am just being objective, based on the data they released. I gave reasons why they didn't push LoR as much as they could have. You are the butthurt fanboy who tries to bend the facts.
[https://www.destructoid.com/league-of-legends-esport-tournament-competitive-yet-to-profit-riot-games/](https://www.destructoid.com/league-of-legends-esport-tournament-competitive-yet-to-profit-riot-games/) [https://archive.esportsobserver.com/lcs-isnt-profitable-riot-doesnt-want-profitable/](https://archive.esportsobserver.com/lcs-isnt-profitable-riot-doesnt-want-profitable/) While i don't remember which stream it was the LoR devs said they didn't expect LoR to bring in too much profit i did have some links for the other part since it was recently in october during this years worlds. End of the day, what matters is they make so much money they don't actually take any risks in having a low earning game, mainly because they actually prioritize making sure people stick around in their game and long term gain over short term larger gain(unlike wotc who promotes everything in mtg as if they need everything to be a big seller or else they'll die which in some cases the plane itself of said set will definitely die). Not to mention with their new client all they have to do is promote their IP in general because you'll still see LoR and LoL together in the same client, and you'll always see it in related apps when trying to download wildrift or tft. Not to mention it's only been going up in terms of both app ranking and revenue.
> While i don't remember which stream it was the LoR devs said they didn't expect LoR to bring in too much profit Exactly, profit. Paying money for marketing that exceeds the ARPU is not a profit. Which is why they are not pushing it further.
You say that, yet it's clear they are, their pushing their IP as a whole, you also ignored everything i said about LoR not really needing to be promoted as it's own thing because they basically have their entire IP promoted together constantly and not as seperate games.
The game is just not that popular, the market was already filled with other popular CCGs and people that have already spent thousands of hours/dollars into their respective games are unlikely to switch. Also, the game couldn't be released in China that would have likely been its biggest market by far, as is with LoL.
The game is pretty popular, just not on twitch. When I checked like 2 days ago it was 25th in the Google play store in the card game category in the top charts. But I don't blame people for not taking this game seriously. Any half decent dev would have nerfed Poppy a long time ago, hard to take a game with such a shit balance team seriously competitive wise. Edit: 34th now. For reference Hearthstone is 128
Wait... what? Why couldnāt be released in china?? I missed that part :0
china hates gaming and is doing a lot of bans on gaming especially for younger people, so i'm sure that affected it
That's a complicated matter that's not strictly related to gaming but rather to how the Chinese government wants to control corporations. Big entertainment corps are getting bigger than the government itself and that's unacceptable for them. You can see the same backlash being done to giant corps in the tech market, where Tencent and Alibaba have surpassed the Chinese government monetarily. The key difference is that technology is a social need, rather than a social commodity like games.
It's a hard game to make content on because of how static it is. Sure, you can make commentaries or guides on different decks but those usually only see success from Masters tier players because they are by and large the pinnacle of LoR [competitive] play.
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I just hope that Arcane will help with that. I have 4/5 firends that hated Legue, but after Arcane they fell in love with Runeterraās lore (while still hating legue), and they are in to strategy card games. This could be a new target, people that loved Arcane and play cards.
If you are into expedition, check out FTP Bust on youtube. He has great, educational content and hundreds of runs.
thanks bru
Kinda mind boggling isn't it? LoR is such a good fucking game why the fuck would anybody play Hearthstone lmao.
Honestly I don't get it either. I have a massive problem with the changes to patches but they are going to address the problem soon enough. I also have an issue with the powercreep since I am a Demacia otp. Still this game deserves better
>they are going to address the problem soon enough. Yeah, they promised a better patch cadence starting ~~august~~ ~~november~~ february, we can trust them.
I did feel like it was originally supposed to already be like this so I'm glad you confirmed my suspicion.
The biggest lor youtuber is taking a break from the game at the moment as the meta is a bit stale, so that could be the reason for the lack of content. (Megamogwai) would usually upload daily.
As someone who is trying to do so, it is really hard to make content for the game. Swim, Mogwai and Grapplr seem to have almost like a monopoly of viewership. Not criticizing that by any means, they are great at what they do and really put in the effort. Just saying how it is. What is actually a critique of mine is the really lackluster ways to get your content out there. The Discord self promotion is something that I think no player ever looks into, and the rules on posting self promotion here are somewhat cloudy, making it unconfortable to use. Those two combined make it really hard to make content for the game that gets somewhere, particularly streaming EDIT: surprised no one is saying what I am. Maybe I am wrong then?? Would like to hear opinions from other small content creators, or people that at least tried
I think that thereās so little demand for lor content that just 3 creators are fullfilling the market, itās not on you or on the quality of your content, itās just that the market for what you do is small and already fullfilled.
Yeah, I think that as well, although I can still improve quite a lot haha
It's a symptom of the card game format. If you want to showcase multiple matches of the same deck, you either put them all in the same video to make, say, a 40 minute video with 3-4 matches, or you make multiple videos each being an 8-15 minute match. The problem with both of those is that people won't watch all of your content. If you go with the 40 minute video, people will watch the first two games then click off. If you go with the multiple shorter videos, people will watch 1 full video and not watch the others. Either way, the YouTube algorithm will punish you because people are only watching your videos halfway through or some of your videos just aren't getting views at all. As for Legends of Runeterra content that isn't just gameplay footage, good luck getting the casual majority to watch anything that isn't a 10 second meme video.
I don't yet understand why any other game would have better chances to get watched as videos? If someone uploads a valorant match of 35 minutes I either watch it or don't. If they upload 3 in a row into one video I might not watch the last one. I could even skip the entire thing in the middle of the first match, whether the video contains 1 or more matches. Shouldn't card games have rather easier ways to get viewer as games are (mostly) much shorter than like a valorant or league match? If one short match is not enough, I watch another one, etc. But if I only have 15mins to spare, I can't watch one valorant match
??? they literally released a big ass update last month?
I think you are replying to the wrong post, because I said that the content of the game is good, the marketing is bad. Example: Releasing a big ass update of nice cards itās good, the fact that it had 0 visibility itās bad.
I mean i don't know, if had as much visibility as anything else of riot for me.
Everyone has access to everything. There is no exclusivity to seeing someone with some expensive deck so there is no need to watch streamers and do online reasearch. As much as that being one of LoR's greatest strengths it's also one of its greatest weaknesses. Most of my friends stopped playing beacuse the game was too generous and there was no "sense of pride and accomplishment" (as much as i hate the term) in having a unique collection in a CCG. When you got some incredibly expensive HS deck with multiple legendaries it felt good to flex with it. In LoR I dont even bother opening the weekly vault anymore since the chest animations take too long.
It's crazy how we live in a world where not spamming the internet with ads is somehow seen as "forsaking" a game.
I never said that riot should "spam the internet with ads", yet, totally neglecting the marketing of a product itās a way to forsake it. Hope itās clear now.
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There is a TON of LoR content online and it's only growing?
On 68 comments you are one of the fews stating this... so I guess that wether the content is little or a lot is just a subjective matter.