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League of Legends studio CEO headlines DICE summit
Riot Games CEO Brandon Beck is the opening keynote speaker at the 2015 DICE summit in Las Vegas, The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences announced in a press release this week. Beck founded Riot, the studio behind League of Legends, in 2006. He's poised to take the DICE stage on Wednesday, February 4. Also scheduled to talk at DICE is Monolith Design Director Michael de Plater, CastAR co-founder Jeri Ellsworth, Ubisoft's New IP Editorial Director Tommy Francois, Funomena CEO Robin Hunicke, and Twitch COO Kevin Lin, among others. See the full lineup in the below press release. DICE runs from February 3 - 5 at the Hard Rock Hotel Las Vegas. The talks and 2015 DICE Awards will be streamed on twitch.tv/dice from February 4 - 5. [Image: Riot]
Unity, Riot Games co-founders join AIAS board of directors
David Helgason, CEO and co-founder of Unity Technologies, and Brandon Beck, CEO and co-founder of Riot Games, have joined the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Board of Directors. For those just catching up, Unity is engine behind everything from garage development games to the upcoming Pillars of Eternity, while Riot Games is the studio behind highly-successful MOBA League of Legends. Helgason and Beck's addition to the AIAS is effective immediately, as is the promotion of Nexon America CEO Min Kim to Chairman. Ted Price, CEO and founder of Insomniac Games and AIAS vice chairman, congratulated all three men on their new titles. "Min's industry experience, his ability to tackle tough problems creatively and his collaborative approach to leadership will help propel the AIAS forward as it tackles more and more ambitious goals," Price said in a press release." "Furthermore congratulations and welcome to our newest board members David and Brandon. Whether it's through putting games development at the fingertips of every aspiring creator or delivering co-operative and competitive play on an unmatched global scale, Brandon and David have driven major change in our industry. We're honored that they're joining our team and we're excited to work with them in furthering the Academy's mission." [Image: Unity/Riot Games]
On the ground at the League of Legends World Championships
It was about 1 p.m. at the Staples Center on Friday, and there was already a crowd. Five hours later, the mass of people would swell to many times the size, as security officers struggled to cram people into the building. At first glance, one could confuse the fans flooding the street as normal sports fans, but then you notice the cosplayers, the Intel-sponsored jerseys and an enormous Tryndamere statue. The Staples Center was packed to the gills with fans all eager to watch one thing: the final matches to determine who would walk away with the Summoner's Cup and the title of League of Legends World Champions.
League of Legends accounts compromised
Given League of Legends' immense popularity, we knew it was only a matter of time before a large-scale hacking attempt succeeded against Riot Games' MOBA juggernaut. The firm sent out an email this weekend notifying EU West and EU Nordic and East customers that their account details may have been compromised. PC Gamer reports that players' "email addresses, encrypted account passwords, and dates of birth have been leaked." Riot bigwigs Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck posted an apology on the EU West forums and implored users to change their login credentials, as "more than half of the passwords were simple enough to be at risk of easy cracking."
Congressman gamer supports Riot Game's anti-SOPA stance
SOPA is an extremely hot-button issue on the internet right now, with politicians, companies, websites, and individuals coming out for and against this controversial piece of US legislation. It's so important that many game studios have broken the unwritten rule of not commenting on politics to state their positions on the matter. Riot Games is one of these studios that have piped up to oppose the bill, as CEO Brandon Beck posted a lengthy reasoning as to why SOPA would harm League of Legends specifically, and he asked players to help stop it from being passed into law. "While we do support efforts to prevent online piracy, the current form of this legislation comes at far too high a cost for us, our players, and online communities across the internet," Beck writes, citing examples as to how the game could be taken offline and the community dismantled if the SOPA were wielded against LoL. Interestingly enough, Colorado Rep. Jared Polis, who is himself a League of Legends player, replied to Beck in support of Riot Games' stance: "I'm particularly concerned that SOPA might stifle the kind of innovation that brings us games we love, such as LoL. The bill makes it far too easy for angry competitors to sue good law abiding companies out of existence." Polis says that he is drafting an alternate piece of legislation to combat internet piracy without SOPA's potential abuse. [Update: If you'd like to encourage other companies to blockade SOPA, you might be interested in the online petition aimed squarely at Electronic Arts.]
Riot Games' close calls with disaster
Riot Games CEO Brandon Beck gave the closing keynote at last week's IGDA Leadership Forum in Los Angeles, California, and during the talk (in which he made the point that "Riot's secret weapon all along" has been its employees), he gave a few interesting examples of how Riot's staff had really gone the extra distance to turn League of Legends into the successful online phenomenon it is today. His first example was about the matchmaking system -- originally, Riot struggled to make sure that players were matched up against each other in an interesting and effective way, and the company ended up bringing in not a game developer, but a programmer with a PhD in computational biology whose "thinking was radically different and compelling," according to Beck. A month after this hire, the company had a whole new matchmaking system, and in the end, it turned out to be "too fair" -- the games were too close. Since "what players remember are the outliers," according to Beck, the team developed "snowball items," which were "risky purchases that rewarded flawless execution." That bit of gameplay mixed up the matches, and came to be the system the game uses today.
League of Legends boasts 15 million registered players
League of Legends has officially surpassed the 15 million player plateau. That means it's time for a smattering of silly stats from the marketing department to help illustrate just how large that number really is. In a new press release published this morning, Riot Games touts everything from its peak concurrency numbers (500,000), to its daily player totals (1.4 million), to the headline-grabbing registered players figure. While those numbers are quite impressive, Riot doesn't stop there. "An average of ten games of LoL start every second of every day," the company says, before adding that "gamers spend 3.7 million hours in-game [...] every day." The title's first season of competitive play is coming to a close, and Riot CEO Brandon Beck has a hearty thank you in store for the title's faithful. "We're committed to continuing to match their dedication with our relentless focus on ongoing enhancements to the player experience with great new features, content, and polish – and we have some very exciting surprises in store just around the corner," he says.
Riot CEO Brandon Beck on forging success with League of Legends
Riot Games has announced player numbers for its extremely popular League of Legends title, and they're pretty phenomenal. With over 15 million registered players, the Defense of the Ancients-style online multiplayer RTS can now brush shoulders with games like Blizzard's World of Warcraft (12 million players), Call of Duty (13 million players on Xbox Live), and The Sims (16 million copies sold), as one of the biggest PC games in history. Granted, as a free-to-play title that relies on microtransactions for revenue, League of Legends has more access to a wider audience than games driven by retail sales or subscriptions. But there's no question at all that this is a huge and exceptionally popular game. Joystiq got to talk with CEO and co-founder of Riot Brandon Beck about today's announcement, and he says that even the company was surprised by how big LoL (as it's called in shorthand) has gotten. "The growth of the League of Legends community far exceeded our expectations," he tells us. "We are proud of the numbers we are hitting on our platform and are confident our fantastic team can continue to grow and evolve our PvP.net technology to handle even greater numbers."
