Riot Games’ League of Legends did bumper business last year, ranking as the second most profitable free to play game in 2013. Riot’s VP of eSports Dustin Beck has indicated that the company sees the shelf life of LoL as somewhere in the range of decades when he spoke at a panel for the Digital-Life-Design Conference in Munich.
“Esports hasn’t really existed on this pro level before, and we wanted to treat our fans, League of Legends players, the same as any fan would come to expect of a European Premier League match or NFL game. Really, to control that broadcast quality we were like, ‘Do we hire someone from BBC sports or FOX sports to go build this out if they have no game knowledge it’s really hard for them to do?’”
Esports to Beck is “a sport like just like anything else. Baseball has been around 110 years. I’m not saying League of Legends will be around that long, but we see the shelf life of LoL as hopefully decades.”
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