Riot Games: the Entrepreneurial Gaming Comapy

A basic definition for entrepreneurship is starting a business from scratch, which includes everything from idea conception to managing the company for the long term; we understand from the definition that any new idea or a new way of implementing the idea is an entrepreneurship, while the definition of ‘Entrepreneur’ is “An individual who, rather than working as an employee, runs a small business and assumes all the risk and reward of a given business venture, idea, or good or service offered for sale. The entrepreneur is commonly seen as a business leader and innovator of new ideas and business processes”.

(http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/entrepreneur.asp#ixzz2CO8HPK7K)

Peter Drucker whom is known as “The Father of Modern Management,” said entrepreneurship centers around innovation “Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation,” Drucker said. “And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.” (Drucker, http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2642-entrepreneurship.html). Entrepreneurs have characteristics such as Ability to Plan, Marketing Skills, Interpersonal Skills and Leadership Skills. The most important skill of all these skills is the passion, the entrepreneurs must love what they are doing to gain success in their businesses, so that they can carry on the obstacles that might face them in their road to success, one other important factory is experience in the business or in the field of work which they will work at, but entrepreneurship has another definition for its importance in the economy Entrepreneurs play a key role in any economy. These are the people who have the skills and initiative necessary to take good new ideas to market and make the right decisions to make the idea profitable. The reward for the risks taken is the potential economic profits the entrepreneur could earn.

Most of MMOs were released since the 90s or since the internet took place in the world, it started in 2D and few years later into 3D, lots of Famous MMOs were released in this era but one of the most famous names was Warcraft, two entrepreneurs Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill were gamers, as any normal gamers a new game were released and they wanted to play it, the game was “Warcraft III : The Frozen Thrones”, the idea started when an honor developer and game designer Steve “Guinsoo” Feak designed a custom map in the game which was called “DotA: All-stars”, Beck and Merrill were amazed to see the new game which changed the game from MMORPG into MMO Battle Arena, and that’s how it started the idea of making a whole new game with the same concept of DotA, Beck and Merrill established there company in 2006 when they decided to make their idea to be true;

The USC Marshall School of Business gave them the Capital needed to get “Riot Games” started which was One million dollars, Beck and Merrill offered the designers of “DotA: All starts” Steve “Guinsoo” Feak and Steve “Pendragon” Mescon jobs at Riot Games to start the development of their idea with the same concept and even with his own game strategy form DotA using the same game engine “Eul” which Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne used , and after 3 years of preparations and development “League of Legends” was released in 2009, since then League of Legends is one of the most played MMOs of all time, it was played more than any other big games like “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcarft” and “Sims”, Riot games made a great success in Asia, about 75% of the daily player are from Asia, such a success needed a partner in this strange cultures to market them in Asia and to be the link between Riot games and the players in at part of the world. As a conclusion “Tencent Inc.”, bought a partner share in Riot games worth 400 million U.S dollars to distribute the game online.

The deal is one of only a handful of partnerships to bring a U.S. developed online game directly to China (2011, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0, 2817, 2379503, 00.asp), while In Southeast Asia, online game service provider “Garena” publishes League of Legends. Riot games now is opening a lot of small offices all over the works in Turkey, Brazil and in Europe, Riot Games has signed an international licensing partnership with GOA, the videogames department of Orange’s Content Division and Europe’s largest gaming portal. On October 13, 2009, GOA and Riot Games announced that they would start channeling server access for players located in Europe, to GOA’s dedicated servers. This restriction meant that players located in Europe would not be able to play on Riot’s servers in the United States. Due to negative community feedback, the channeling decision was rescinded October 16, 2009. In North America, Riot Games will self-publish and operate the game and all of its customer service aspects.

On May 10, 2010, Riot Games announced that they would take over distribution and operation of the game in Europe. To do so, Riot Games established a European HQ in Dublin, Ireland (2010, http://www.idaireland.com/news-media/press-releases/riot-games-inc-establishe/). League of Legends experienced The 2010 World Cyber Games Grand Finals at Los Angeles; the competitors came from around the world to compete, Teams from China, Europe and America came to Los Angeles for the sake of League of Legends, since then Riot Games is one of the supports of e-Sports, their Organized their championship in 2011 based on the teams score in the in game system ranked games and made a prices for the winner First takes 50,000 U.S. Dollars, second 30,000 U.S. Dollars and third 20,000 U.S Dollars, they made a live streaming over the internet which scored more than 210 thousand views in the semifinals of the championship.

And Riot Games announced that they made a budget for the championship season 2. Most of the successful entrepreneurs have common factors of success which are Firstly, Be passionate which mean that you must be enthusiastic about what you’re trying to accomplish. That indicates you’re willing to compromise most of your getting time to the concept you’ve come up with. Your interest will spark the same strength in the others who are an aspect of you as you develop a group. And with interest, both your group and your clients are more likely to truly believe in what you are trying to do, maintain focus which indicates that Excellent business owners concentrate extremely on an chance where others see nothing. This concentrate and strength allows removing lost attempt and disruptions. Most organizations die from heartburn rather than hunger. Companies experience from doing too many factors simultaneously rather than doing too few factors very well.