For years, we thought that League of Legends mobile was just vapourware. After Riot rejected the idea outright everybody here at Gamespace put the idea to bed. It turns out we were wrong.
An exclusive report from the Reuters news agency turned general wisdom on its head yesterday with a report that Riot Games and Tencent are on course to complete a League of Legends mobile game. Multiple sources confirmed that Riot and parent company Tencent have been busy working on a handheld version of the insanely popular desktop game for over a year. It is unlikely, however, that we will see this hit the App Store any time soon.
Despite Riot’s initial refusal to develop a mobile iteration of the massive MOBA, this news is not all that surprising. League of Legends is waning in popularity when set against titles like Epic’s Fortnite. The game took $1.4 billion in revenue over the last fiscal year. This sounds great but it is down more than 20%. With pressure on its popularity and income down, mobile gaming seems like an obvious untapped revenue stream.
King of The Castle
There is already precedent for this move. IN 2015 Tencent launched its own mobile MOBA, called Honour of Kings. The game managed a seriously successful launch of late with over 200 million players between 2015 and 2017. Despite some run-ins with the Chinese state media, that called the game poison, and a drop in Tencent market value of around $17.5 million, Honour of Kings is definite proof of concept.
We don’t have more information on the likely format, monetization, or overall development of this League of Legends mobile client. We do know that we will have more details as soon as it comes out. You can find out more about Riot’s League of Legends desktop offering at the official League of Legends website.
