The future of the gaming world is much different than it would have been, say, 10 years ago. The free-to-play model is rampant and successful and makes definitive E-sports titles more accessible than ever before, which can be attributed to the popularity that has taken off in the west.
Games like League of Legends and Dota 2 are prime examples of the success of the model, with anyone being able to pick them up and compete if they so desire, increasing the library of competitive players and reaching the boundaries outside of South Korea for major sports-like influence for tournaments.
An excerpt of the interview
Game Informer: How do you explain your success?
"Brandon Beck: It has a lot to do with the focus on our players and a focus on understanding what the gaming community wants. That starts by being hardcore gamers ourselves. One thing that’s pretty unique about Riot is that just about everyone you meet in any position at the company is going to be a very serious gamer with an extremely long track record of games played. If we’re not in the office and we’re not sleeping, we’re spending an awful lot of time playing games. Actually, if we’re in the office, we might be playing games as well."
Where do you see competitive gaming going in the future?
I think competitive gaming is going to grow increasingly more mainstream. Right now, particularly in North America and Europe, it’s sort of a novel idea. Some people are still surprised it exists. But we’ve seen other markets quick to adopt competitive gaming in serious ways, like in Korea where gaming has been televised for a number of years. With competitive League of Legends, when we’re on live TV, we’ve often competed for the top of prime-time ratings with sports like soccer.
"We don’t see competitive gaming replacing those sports anytime soon, but we do think it’s something that’s going to make its way into the mainstream psyche and that’s really cool."
Riot does explain that the marketing of such successful up and coming competitive MoBA/ARTS franchises are not one-shoe-fits-all, and goes on to explain how it's very situational.
"Free-to-play isn’t the answer for every game. It really comes down to the content itself and finding a model that provides players with the most choice and the most value.
It certainly doesn't work for everything, but Dota2 and LoL have shown the exemplary power in allowing anyone to compete and skyrocketing the games into a mainstream spotlight.
Source: Game Informer
