It’s tempting to run a gamer friendly, cosmetics-forward strategy for your live service game. But you can’t have a League of Legends sized outcome without a League of Legends sized audience. This is the lesson learned by Velan games as it shuts down Knockout City after one year as a free-to-play title…
Don’t feel like reading? Enjoy this quick video analysis instead. Trumpeted on stage at WWDC, given the Editor’s Choice on release and featured to an unprecedented degree in the Gamers television ad for iPhone 6, no game has seen as strong of a promotional push from Apple as Metal showpiece Vainglory. The fantastic take on MOBA for mobile devices has seen strong reviews and industry support. And yet the game’s performance has underwhelmed relative to […]
This article originally appeared on GamesIndustry.biz. I’m 28 minutes into my 4th ever match of League of Legends when it happens. Another player lets me know that I “is noob” and “suck ballz.” Post game, the player antagonizes the chat room saying we are “so fricken bad” and the “worst team ever”. That’s when TwoBigButts comes to our defense, letting the abusive player know they were not so great either and that they should go […]
When it comes to free-to-play, few games are held up as paragons of virtue as frequently as League of Legends. When writing about my practice as a monetziation design consultant, LoL and TF2 are the two games that come up whenever anonymous internet commenters let me know how much they hate me and all F2P games with these two exceptions. LoL, and by extension Riot, is a smash success on every conceivable metric: from daily user […]