League of Legends - An Example of Today's Game Industry Practices

Otherwise known as LoL, League of Legends is a game made by a startup company called Riot. The business is made of many individuals who are apparently quite experienced in various aspects of the industry, from programmers, to financial experts, to web designers, graphic designers, and more. League of Legends is a game that pits up to 5 players against another 5, each of which can choose one of around forty champions called Summoners. The game is free to download and play, but there is a pay model available for those who wish to have slightly different looking Summoners, or to gain experience to level up faster, etc. What is interesting is how this game is an example of how the game industry in general has (please excuse the term), bastardized their offerings.

Please allow me to offer my experience with this game. I have a level thirty account, the max level you can achieve. I did it solely through effort, no pay involved. That was a nice feature of this offering, in that I didn't have to pay to play. I've leveled faster than most (as I have a ton of gaming experience), even those who have payed to gain levels faster. I play about 10 or so Summoners well, and a few others decently. I have about fifty players on my buddy list, and I can easily find a game with many of them. Now, I'm not trying to talk myself up, but to say I know what I'm talking about with this game. I've been playing computer games, since I was a young lad, so I consider myself an expert.

Credibility having been established, I will now explain what I mean by the game industry "bastardizing" their offerings. Long ago, game companies would develop entertaining products that offered little in graphics and sound, but more than made up for what they lacked, in quality and entertainment value. Over the years, quality and entertainment value seem much less important than graphics and sound. Don't get me wrong, graphics and sound are crucial to the experience, but if the program crashes often, the controls are too hard to learn or too complex, or the game simply isn't fun, then what's the point?

This is where League of Legends comes in as a prime example. They offer the game free, likely due to the $8 million in funding they managed to procure. They make up for it being free by offering new costumes for your Summoners, experience boosts and more for actual money. This isn't a bad model, as they will gain popularity fast by offering it free. The problem is that just about every time they have to patch the software, it takes quite a long time for the servers to be brought back up, and most of the time Riot is giving its users estimated times when their servers will be up that they don't meet by a long-shot. Most of the patches appear ("on paper") to concentrate on fixing critical balancing issues between Summoners and features, game performance, etc. However, in my opinion, most of the patching seems to change the User Interface (UI) around, unnecessarily and concentrate on the graphics and sound more than actually fixing any real errors.

For example, they changed the game announcer's voice several times and they offer only two real maps to play on, despite promising more. When the Store was supposed to become active for people to pay for additional things for the game, they had to bump it's opening date twice to get it working and it didn't work well, even then. Some people who paid for things had trouble getting what they paid for to show up or work. Patching appears to cause more crashes every time I play, and the much-toted matchmaking system (which is supposed to balance out the teams' player makeups) doesn't work well either. I find myself on teams with very inexperienced players, which would be fine if the other team had a level thirty and other inexperienced players, but then we end up competing against a team of mostly very experienced players.

I can't complain much, as I play for free, and I'm glad I don't pay anything for the game. If I did, I would be livid by not being able to use the products I've paid for or by not being able to use them as intended. I see people constantly complaining on the forums about what's happening, while others simply insult them for their concerns. I look at it like having bought a car and it not working or not coming with tires. I would treat my customers better. Do I understand how hard it is to program a game like that? Yes. Do I understand that patching software for thousands of people can provide unexpected results? Yes. Was the product ready for launch at the end of it's beta phase? No, and I was a beta tester, since closed beta.

Behavior like this from game companies is fairly commonplace these days and very inexcusable. If I were asked to provide an example of a good game company that actually does provide quality products (with few hiccups), that have great graphics, sound, gameplay value, and controls, I would instantly say, "Blizzard." Considering some of the top people over at Riot come from Blizzard, makes me all the more unsympathetic to the problems they have.