The cult video game League of Legends has made its developers multi-millionaires, earned $20 billion in revenue and turned into an influential esports discipline. But under the pressure of young competitors, the hit of Studio Riot Games is losing positions. What will LoL creators do?

28 days after the Forbes interview, Riot Games co-founder Mark Merrill was scheduled to give the most important presentation of his career. The entrepreneur was preparing for the historic moment in an office in West Los Angeles. While conducting a"training" pitch, Merrill paused for a second after each slide was shown to gauge the reaction of the audience, which consisted of just one person — a Forbes journalist. On the screen, the shining Riot Game logo was slowly supplemented with a yellow S - the word GameS. The "game" is symbolically turned into a "games": animation didn't just announce an event where the studio presented new products. It was also an ironic reference to the fact that for many years the business of Riot Games revolved around just one game — the cult League of Legends (LoL).

The presentation took place last week. It was timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of LoL — formally the only product in the catalog of the American developer. The game was an incredible success, which was not dreamed of by its authors - Merrill and his partner Brandon Beck in October 2009. Every day, up to 8 million users are in LoL at the same time. The game has become a powerful eSports discipline — last year, 100 million viewers watched the final of the world Legends championship (won by the Chinese Invictus Gaming). Since its launch, LoL has generated $20 billion in revenue for Riot Games, and Merrill and Beck turned into multi-millionaires when they sold the Studio in several stages to the Chinese Internet holding company Tencent, which valued the business at $366 million in 2011.

"Our intellectual property has 200 million fans," Merrill proudly declares. — We understand what level of expectations are placed on us, and we believe that the current success is only the tip of the iceberg. We're like "Star Wars" at the beginning, but instead of a movie, we have a game."

In reality, things in the LoL universe are still as if "Star wars" ended on the first film. According to Nielsen's SuperData Analytics Agency, the game "earned" $1.7 billion in 2018. for the industry, the result is certainly impressive, but for LoL itself, it is far from a record: two years earlier, in 2016, the figure was $2.9 billion. "Legends" in the market are being pushed by younger and more ambitious free multiplayer games led by Fortnite. The latter, unlike LoL, is available on all known platforms from the smartphone to the PlayStation. The game from Riot Games was still only available on PC. LoL is still very popular, but "has definitely stopped developing," says Michael Packter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.

To get rid of this stereotype, the Studio held a pompous event for fans in 16 cities at once, including Moscow, Sao Paulo and Los Angeles. The developer wanted to kill two birds with one stone: celebrate a decade of incredibly successful product and show that you are ready to confidently enter a new era.