Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2020

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At USC in the late 1990s, Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck were bonding over video games and noticing that free, player-made modifications for the game Warcraft III were becoming wildly popular online. The two friends were so impressed by these mods that they decided to create their own multiplayer strategy game with an unusual twist: they'd offer the game for free, but charge players money for new characters or customizable clothing (or "skins"). Many investors balked at the idea, unsure that a free game—created by total novices—would generate enough revenue. After three rocky years of development, Marc and Brandon's company Riot Games launched League of Legends in 2009. Over the past 11 years, it's become one of the most popular PC games of all time, pulling in $1.5 billion in 2019 alone.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:31.0	You know, not only do you have to build an incredibly fun game, which is really hard, by the way.
0:35.0	There's a lot of really difficult problems to solve there, where it has to work and the system has to scale and has to be able to update
0:42.0	and the balance of the game from a math perspective needs to be incredibly precise.
0:47.0	You need the content to be compelling, where people fall in love with the characters in the way that somebody would for, you know,
0:53.0	Batman or, you know, any of their favorite superheroes. And so there's so many things that you have to get right.
0:58.0	It, again, it's like, Brandon and I sort of joke that knowing what you know now, we wouldn't have invested in ourselves back then.
1:04.0	Prime NPR is how I built this.
1:13.0	A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and stories behind the movements they built.
1:19.0	I'm Guy Ross, and on the show today, how two avid gamers fended off for reluctant investors, naysaying experts, and their own self-doubt to build riot games.
1:33.0	And one of the most successful video games ever created, League of Legends.
1:40.0	In 2006, a video game company called Bethesda Softworks tried out an experiment.
1:49.0	At the time, Bethesda had a popular video game called Oblivion.
1:54.0	In that year, it decided to offer its users an extra feature, horse armor, not real armor, virtual armor that you could use in the game.
2:03.0	And Bethesda offered it up for $2.50.
2:07.0	It was an incredibly controversial decision, and most players reacted badly. They didn't like it.
2:14.0	But enough gamers decided to try it out and bought the armor, and it proved a theory that company had, that you could create an entire revenue stream through what became known as micro transactions.
	...

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