Telling Riot Games that one-hit wonders flame out is pointless—they already know that.

I was listening to This Week in Tech this past week with a particular guest on the panel, Jessica Lessin. She used to be a part of the Wall Street Journal and seemed to be one of the few that would be able to report on Apple rumors to the mainstream media with some sort of authority. I guess it made her pretty important in that grand scheme of market analysis and anticipation, but I haven’t really read the Wall Street Journal with any consistency, so I wouldn’t really know.

dotaclonefeaturedLessin was on because she’s relatively knowledgeable about all things tech, but also because she’s not with the Wall Street Journal anymore. She’s recently brought into fully swing a paywall news site called The Information. I’ve meant to give the site a once over and try it out for the shortest amount of time I could pre-purchase in advance, but I have to admit, after previewing some of the site’s content, I ended up not even bothering to see how much it could set me back.

All because some dunce decided to bend Riot Games over the proverbial barrel intent on patronizing it in prose with traditional business wisdom.

Traditional business wisdom suggests that EA is a better game developer than Riot Games.

The article headline reads: “Riot Games Beware: One-Hit Wonders Flame Out”

Well, Eric P. Newcomer, of course one-hit wonders flame out. It would be silly to ignore all the other rumors about Riot developing new titles, such as an online card game, not to mention the co-founder’s admission that Riot develop new ideas—results one might find with five minutes at the helm of the good ship Google.com.

Compared to companies like EA, which I’m assuming this writer has to have the biggest hard-on ever for, Riot is, I concede, a company that doesn’t really publish its long-term goals. It never has. Even the with the card game they were building, I’m sure a traditional games developer public relations person would have gladly announced that they were finally getting around to making a second game in a bland press release that could give potential investors something to consider.

Riot’s only publicly stated goals are to make fun games and… make fun games. As far as I can tell.

However, Riot has taken the more Apple approach to its future roadmap, keeping as much as possible inside the company and out of the public’s eyes until it’s ready to be deployed or until the decision is made to follow through. As far as I can tell, League of Legends has a big huge sugar daddy in the form of Tencent on top of being a currency printing machine in and of itself. It’d be hard to argue that Riot Games couldn’t live without League of Legends when you consider that the company is set for at least the next decade and probably further into the future than that.

So what exactly prompted this defense of Riot Games? Don’t you think that League of Legends pales in comparison to the more skillful DOTA-clone, Dota 2?

Yes, that is true. No, I’m not going to attack Riot Games in this post because I don’t really have anything concrete to stand on other than the fact that it’s a personal preference, even though I am horrible at all types of strategy games.

However, this excerpt published as a preview made me change my mind about LoL being all bad:

Riot Games, maker of the popular League of Legends computer game, is emerging as a gaming company to watch thanks to its free-to-play business model that offers hope for the dim PC gaming industry. But the company should take a lesson from gaming giants of the past and be quick to diversify. Timeless money-making hits are rare to non-existent in the gaming world.

Unlike many video game companies that charge around $50 for their games, Riot offers League of Legends for free and charges users for in-game currency which can be spent on new characters.

And so, I continue to my main point.

League of Legends is the success companies like EA can only dream about, but will never realize because Riot still has a soul.

It’s true, though. My recent praise of Titanfall and anticipation of the in-development Mass Effect 4 (when it’s finished, I can’t wait just please don’t wait until 2016) aside, EA has completely lost its soul, but that doesn’t meant that business-minded folks are completely against its profiteering ways. They’re in it for the money. It’s never been about anything but the money since the middle of the 90s.

Riot, however, have one success to drive them forward on. And sure, another game is out there in the ether somewhere ready to take Riot into new genres or markets, but that time isn’t here yet. Until it is, they have a monster of a job trying to balance all the heroes in League of Legends while keeping the money coming in from both new and veteran players alike. Nothing about how Riot’s acted suggests that anything is slowing down for the one-game company.

EA on the other hand, is trying to make money hand over fist by killing a majority of their beloved IPs and poorly managing the ones that are still relevant. Somewhere, an EA executive sleeps at night, on their Californian king size bed stuffed with money, dreaming that one day, he’ll actually be able to fill his bed with hundred dollar bills instead of fifty dollar bills so that he can properly feel the ideal level of arrogance and smug even whilst asleep.

Riot isn’t resting on its laurels. They’re always developing new things to add to League or actually getting along with each other. They’re experimenting with new business relationships for esports’ sake.

All EA has going for it are two major releases we’re expecting will be good even though PC players will end up being tied to Origin, because no one at EA actually gives a shit about players. Riot actually has players who like their game and care about players, even though they do stupid shit like not have all the heroes accessible to everyone for free. But that’s another point of contention for another rant.

It seems to be Titanfall or bust for FPS games.

One of the most viewed posts on my site is entitled “Will the next big competitive FPS please stand up?” in which I waxed nearly-poetic about how I thought that either Infinity Ward or EA were going to reclaim the FPS estate with Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3, respectively, only to find out that neither title lived up to the competitive goal they had set for each other.

bcdm_fps_titanfallA few other games have also come out into their own set of successes and failures that might have had an effect or two on the FPS genre as a whole. A little retrospective is in order, I’d imagine. A word of warning: I am incredibly ignorant when it comes to actually rating a game, but I have a reason for blasting through these games like I have. Just keep reading.

Oh yeah, this is a rant. I don’t even want to claim that anything following is factual, because I am dumb. This is just, my opinion, maaan.

Some good games, some bad games

Battlefield 3 enjoyed some success in its reboot of the famed name, thanks to the massive new vistas it created in both its single-player and online components. Seeing a radio tower collapse from ground level as an infantryman onto a tank driven by an enemy player right in front of me is one of those first-time experiences you don’t forget, even if I was playing the game 800×600. However, EA was not able to carry that momentum forward into its follow-up title, Battlefield 4. The latter is an exercise filled with game crashes and network issues that is so poor their Premium content calendar is open-ended, compared to the stable beat of content provided for Premium members in the previous title.

Fake Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 3 gave way to Treyarch’s Black Ops 2, a Call of Duty franchise addition which, in nearly every way, advanced the series forward with the focus being placed on keeping the experience at a fluid framerate while pushing the bounds of graphics on console systems. While dedicated servers and PC-specific support failed in this release, everything else about it felt great. I have to say, it reminded me so much of how good the original Modern Warfare (made by the true Infinity Ward) felt online. To this day, I have registered Black Ops 2 as one of the finest online experiences I’ve ever had with the Xbox 360.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been the only FPS game that I can really think of that has found its own success in not being like the others. Embracing a few of the new tricks that Valve and series co-developer Hidden Path have picked up from other multiplayer development and experimentation, CSGO has become a premier competitive title that isn’t only proven to be entertaining for spectators, but has become the pinnacle of what showcasing professional-level talent is all about in its high stakes format. I’ve been recently trying to give this game a serious go and I think that I am almost well enough versed in what to do that I could soon start playing competitive modes and get ranked. It’d be interesting to see how far I could get. Just another reason why this game has found success–and it’s not even a free-to-play game.

Activision’s truckload of money addiction made eventually allowed Fake Infinity Ward’s turn came back up to try to ship a title that people would buy en masse. Their Ghosts product certainly changed a few things. Instead of Treyarch’s easter-egg-turned-puzzle zombies game mode which eventually rated its own executable, Fake Infinity Ward decided that a future-looking design could be paired with aliens. This is just the co-op feature. Forcing a meta game shift into all other game modes while defacing or removing staple game modes helped turn off the most amount of vocal Call of Duty fans who keep YouTube channels or prop up the game’s competitive scene.

Thanks for the history lesson, but what am I supposed to grasp from all of that?

The trend one should notice is what types of FPS games have not really achieved any progression: the mainstream shooters. And it’s killing them.

That’s not to say that skill-based shooters aren’t worth investing in time into, but it’s just that there is an audience behind each game that is exclusive to that franchise or series. My thinking is that they more bells and whistles that they add to make the game more fun for casual players and players who have grown up with a particular series (fake-Infinity Ward, I’m looking at you, you sorry bunch of sellouts) increases the likelihood that the developer will miss the mark and eventually drop competitive-friendly features and support from future iterations in the series.

This was the case in the removal of a realistically usable spectator mode from Call of Duty in favor of the lobby-based multiplayer experience that crawled over to PCs from the booming consoles. When it takes a mobile television studio worth of HD A/V switchers and so on to effectively broadcast a game, of course the only realistic broadcasters for that title are going to be bigger competitions with a lot of money and capital behind them—MLG and Activision’s own million dollar competition.

Call of Duty, the proverbial titan of the genre, introduced meta gaming elements into a more traditional ruleset—chase after a player and they drop free points you can have for doing something completely stupid that forces you to play differently. Oh, and how about those killstreaks, man? I could give you a free one just for running around with a knife and playing Rambo for a split second.

Titanfall will have an impact on the level of what Modern Warfare brought to FPS

Forcing 6v6? Two roles for players? Proper balancing? No extra bullshit? Good matchmaking?

All of these are things that Titanfall will bring to the was-next-hen-now-current-gen table. Will the Call of Duty folks will be waiting for Treyarch to fix their series or Halo: The 343 Trilogy: Episode 2 to right the wrongs? Perhaps the Call of Duty faithful, but overall, the imting of Titanfall’s upcoming release is perfect. A late Q1/early Q2 release window for the title across several platforms ensures that only naysayers and legitimate EA boycotters (of which there are probably none, but just for the sake of suggesting all of the angles here…) will undoubtedly be wishing they didn’t have to drop another season’s pass worth of money on a game that appears to be more fun than Call of Duty or Halo—even though Halo 4 wasn’t really a step forward for the arena/hybrid shooter.

With a delayed Xbox 360 launch coming up, an on-time release for the Xbox One might be enough of an incentive to get the Xbox faithful, like myself, who are waiting for the right time to step up to the current generation console to decide that the right time is at Titanfall’s release. It might just be, speaking for myself, but that’s not the biggest reason that Titanfall will bring about a huge swing for the competitive FPS that isn’t Counter-Strike.

The biggest reason is that, thanks to League of Legends and other Dota-clones, small-team matchmaking is making a serious comeback into mainstream gaming culture. Forcing 6v6 into Titanfall is going to make the game become an even bigger deal in such a way so that the game could only become a genre-shattering title of even greater importance if it were free-to-play, pay-to-customize title akin to League of Legends. However, this is a EA joint, so I’m guessing that won’t ever happen in a million years to a title that will be released on console platforms because guaranteed money is better than free-to-play money for consoles.

I can’t think of any other FPS title that could see a release at this point that could dethrone a series like Call of Duty… but thanks to the lackluster attempts from EA’s DICE team to repair a broken-at-launch title and Activision’s fake-Infinity Ward group’s efforts to make a good game full-stop, Titanfall has the biggest chance to steal the industry’s spotlight away and run off with it.

At least until Treyarch gets up to bat again. Then we’ll have an old-fashioned one-up contest.