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Disrupting the Gaming Industry: Riot Games in Harvard Business Review

Our friends at Riot Games have been awesome enough to tell their story at a number of Chef events, and even took us to school in a “Riot Rumble” here at Chef HQ last year.

So it’s especially delightful to see Riot profiled in the Harvard Business Review. The piece – “Disrupting the Gaming Industry with the Same Old Playbook” – details how Riot is exemplary of the rampant success for Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG), which was an $8 billion market in 2013. The author, Alessandro Di Fiore, writes:

“The MMOG that epitomizes the birth of this new industry is perhaps League of Legends (LoL)… The game has been popular since its release in the 2009 and has an active unique monthly user base of 67 million, generating $625 million in annual revenue.”

That’s definitely a strong endorsement for LoL’s success. But what’s even cooler is the props Di Fiore goes on to give Riot’s strategy:

“This all sounds splendidly disruptive: new technology-enabled social media redefining what we think of as sport. Yet the hype tends to obscure just how familiar the story actually is and just how much of the success is the result of canny business folk applying a well-used playbook.”

There’s more interesting facts and analysis to be found in the full article, so check it out here.

Lucas Welch

Former Chef Employee