Amongst a massive company-wide restructuring and layoffs, Riot has announced some important plans for LoR or Legends of Runeterra, including focusing primarily on PvE.
Released in 2020, Legends of Runeterra has been the premier card game from Riot Games. Additionally, it takes place in the universe of League of Legends, so LoR greatly expands on the lore of the game as well.
As a card game, LoR is the fairest of them all. Card games are not known to be free-to-play friendly. Besides Marvel Snap, no other free-to-play card games work in the current market. Even so, Legends of Runeterra remained a staple game in the CCG space.
However, even the community realized from very early on that LoR is not a sustainable game. Traditional CCG makes money by selling packs like Hearthstone, MTG, Pokemon TCG, etc. However, you get all of the cards by just playing and getting Wildcards, shards, chests, etc.
Additionally, it is no secret that LoR’s PvP and competitive is not as active as other CCGs. Even though the addition of the rotation queue added an influx of new players from other games, sadly, it’s still not enough.
Recently, Riot Games has announced massive company-wide restructuring, including layoffs of around 11% of their workforce. Alongside this, they have also announced some important things regarding some of their games. One such game is Legends of Runeterra.
Read more: Riot Games Lays Off 530 Employees, Also Shuts Down Riot Forge.
What’s Going On With Legends of Runeterra?
As stated before, Riot Games went on a massive restructuring recently. From there, we saw that around 530 Rioters were getting laid off from the company. Not only that, they are also changing their approach to their business strategy. Two places that will feel this impact immediately are Riot Forge and Legends of Runeterra.
Even though we already talked about Riot Forge earlier, I will still talk about it briefly. Riot is sunsetting the Riot Forge after releasing their upcoming game, Bandle Tale.
And about Legends of Runeterra, as stated before, the game isn’t as profitable as the rest of the games in the Riot Games catalog. Due to this, we have seen many changes in their monetization strategy over the game’s lifespan. Even so, it didn’t really help much in LoR’s case. Therefore, we have seen massive layoffs in the LoR team.
Future of LoR: Path of Champions PvE Contents & More
Although LoR isn’t that profitable, its future isn’t as grim as Riot Forge’s. One game mode that really keeps players engaged in Legends of Runeterra is the Path of Champions game mode. On release, it doubled the player counts of the game. Due to this reason, Riot expanded on it with Path of Champions 2.0. Around that time, most players spent most of their time playing Path of Champions rather than other modes.
Path of Champions is definitely the way forward. However, what does that mean for PvP content? Even though Riot didn’t mention anything about PvP, we can expect they won’t be as regularly updated as before. This is sad news if you mainly play ranked or even a pro player yourself.
But Path of Champions might be what the player base actually needs. Since most casual LoR players already only play this PvE mode, if Riot focuses primarily on it, we will see even more players than before. Thus, this game will be more sustainable.
Even though they didn’t emphasize it, LoR is now part of the League studios. Thus, people who oversee League of Legends will also oversee LoR as well. This means it will all be led by Meddler. And from his track record, we can be assured that the game is in the right hands.
And finally, on 2 February 2024, Riot Meddler, Eric, Marc Merrill, and Dave will talk extensively about Legends of Runeterra. So we will know more information on that date.
