For all its talk about being a big ol’ piece of ~~freemium content~~, League of Legends is really expensive. Too expensive, some people (like me) might say. Despite the grief critics give Riot for monetizing almost every inch of League’s virtual real estate, it’s really not as bad as a free-to-play MOBA could be.
YouTuber Randy Nova (via Reddit) paints a nightmare scenario of free-to-play microtransactions gone amok in League of Legends with a new video that asks what it’d be like if Riot’s wildly successful MOBA was somehow acquired by Electronic Arts, of all places:
It’s a real terror to behold. Just imaging having new items made available to purchase being shoved in your face like this every few minutes in a League match:
Or having to buy “mage packs” and the like:
Or buy you’re way back into the game every time that you die:
...though some of this stuff, like the “boosts” you can buy to gain experience or in-game currency faster, aren’t even a joke since they literally exist that way in League of Legends already:
The specific dig at EA; casting everything in a hyperbolic caricature of The Sims 4 that isn’t really representative of how that game —which is excellent by the way—is an unnecessarily pointed joke at the company’s expense. That’s especially true when you consider that The Sims, the game it’s lampooning specifically, actually has really great premium content, and does a much better job allowing its players to create and share their own makings with one another.
Plus some of this stuff actually looks kinda decent. I could fuck with this new launcher, for instance, that looks a lot slicker than the current League client:
And this UI ain’t half bad either:
That being said, Nova’s video has a reasonable amount of shade-throwing given that Riot’s proven itself to be far more tactful than EA at monetizing its freemium content in ways that its players consider fair, reasonable, and most certainly not pay-to-win for the most part. That and the fact that EA gave up on developing its MOBA Dawngate before the game even had a chance to go toe to toe with the genre heavyweights.
Ultimately, my main takeaway here is I am so fucking glad League of Legends hasn’t ever tried to dive into #social #media #integration, because those “share your latest baron steal!” pop-ups would be agonizing.
Thank you for sparing us that annoyance, Riot.