According to a new report by Reuters, Riot Games and its major shareholder, Tencent, have started working on a mobile version of their hit MOBA game League of Legends. The article states that the game is already more than a year in development and should be released sometime next year.
Tencent is known for its mobile games. In the past, the company has tried to create alternatives for League of Legends on mobile with games such as Honor of Kings and Arena of Valor. However, while these games were super successful in China, they didn’t really hit it in the rest of the world. League of Legends mobile should change that.
If we’re looking for reasons on why Tencent is willing to create a major competitor for their own games, we can simply glance at the numbers of the concurrent League of Legends player base. For quite some time now, League of Legends has been seeing a significant decline in player numbers and Riot Games might need more ways to monetize the game. We should also keep in mind that League of Legends is the only Riot Games’ title.
League of Legends has been around for 10 years by now and the name of the IP could bring a lot of new players to the game. Having in mind that mobiles account to almost half of the games industry revenue, the creation of League of Legends mobile seems like a logical next step for the franchise.
