Dota 2 vs League of Legends - Who wins (from a marketing perspective)?

Dota 2 vs
League of Legends
Who wins (from a marketing perspective)?

With two MOBA-titles dominating the world
of eSports right now and setting new bench-
marks in any aspect of this part of the ga-
ming industry, we were curious how the
marketing strategies of Dota 2 and League
of Legends work. We dug ourselves through
various sources and tried to put the pieces
together to get the big picture. While both
publishers - Valve and Riot Games - follow
very similar approaches, both have their
unique methods of engaging their audien-
ces, sometimes learning from each other.

Who would win if the marketing teams of
both competitors would be put into an arena
with their strategies as weapons?

Let the battle begin!

Round 1:

Interaction with the audience

Riot Games’ total dedication to the          Dota. What started as a custom map for
gamer                                        the game Warcraft III has evolved into a
                                             standalone game called Dota 2. Some
According to an [a]listdaily-interview       legal issues arose concerning the use of
from 2012 with Chris Enock, VP of Central    the name: On the one side you had Val-
Publishing at Riot Games, the team of        ve, the recent publisher of Dota 2 and
marketeers take “Riot’s mission to heart”.   on the other side Blizzard creators of the
They try to be the most player-focused       game Warcraft III, and former develo-
company in the world. This means feed-       pers of Dota now working at Riot Games.
back by players is taken serious at Riot     After these quarrels were settled the title
Games and the dialogue with the play-        went through a critically acclaimed two-
ers is the most important aspect of the      year beta phase.
League of Legends marketing strategy.
They also want to make sure players          Dota 2 started with an already functio-
understand how their feedback is used        ning community but the fact that League
to further improve the game.                 of Legends was able to answer the
                                             demand of the gamers for a stand-alone
Using the “voice of the customer” for        MOBA-title years before Valve shifted
design and development of a product is       a lot of Dota-Fans to Riot Games and
not a new principle, but with a passiona-    their version of this genre. This is a good
te and engaged crowd like players of a       example for the importance of timing in
videogame, this method turns out to be       terms of marketing strategy.
highly effective. “The net impact is that
our players end up doing most of our
marketing for us – what you‘d call earned
media in your framework”, Chris Enock        Riot Games: 1, Valve: 1
added.
                                             Both games are very community driven
Dota as a community asset                    and built on interaction with the players.
                                             While League of Legends does an im-
A design process backed by the crowd is      pressively good job keeping the crowd
not unique to League of Legends. It’s fair   burning, Dota 2 benefits from the legacy
to say that the whole genre of MOBA-         of being the ancestor of the first suc-
games is based on a community ap-            cessful MOBA-game on the market. So
proach called Defense of the Ancients or     each competitor gets one point.

Round 2:

Free to play

The concept of a free-to-play multiplay-    While recent studies about the spen-
er game was not a revolutionary idea        ding of F2P-players suggest that only
when Riot games released League of          2.2% ever pay, it doesn’t mean that the
Legends in 2009, but the business mo-       other 97.8% are worthless in terms of the
del that became more and more suc-          success of a game. In an interview with
cessful with browser games and casual       eurogamer.net, Nicholas Lovell, owner
games on mobile devices proved to be        of F2P-focused games business site
superior to subscription based models.      Gamesbrief, explains: „These freeloaders
From today’s perspective the choice of      are nevertheless vital to the success of
making LoL free-to-play turned out to       your F2P game. They provide context for
be crucial to the success of this game      the spending amongst the most com-
and for sure influenced the strategy of     mitted fans.”
Valve to make Dota 2 a free-to-play title
as well.                                    Translated to the marketing strategies
                                            of Valve and Riot Games: players who
Two different approaches                     don’t spend money on the game are still
                                            an important marketing asset as they
Both publishers have a different ap-        help to grow the impressive numbers in
proach to this business model. While        players, fans and viewers, make it easier
starting players in League of Legends       to find people to play with, generate all
can only play a changing selection of       the buzz around a title and by doing this
10 champions for free at any given time     make the game itself more important
and need to unlock the whole roster with    and valuable to those who decide to pay
influence points gained during play, all    for its use.
champions in Dota 2 are accessible at
once. For Valve the revenue comes from
sale of cosmetic items only. Players can
pay to unlock more champions and cos-       Riot Games: 1, Valve: 1
metic features like new skins in League
of Legends.                                 Despite less free gaming content, it is
                                            not easy to define Dota 2 as the clear
                                            winner in this section. The F2P concept
                                            works for both games well and is the
                                            foundation of its success. In terms of
                                            marketing: there is no clear winner here.

Round 3:

Word of mouth

Recruiting your Friends

Another important pillar of the League of      Riot Games: 1, Valve: 0
Legends marketing strategy is the Refer-
A-Friend program. Its current version          Because of the abstinence of a real
2.0 was released in 2012 and features          reward scheme and recommendation
in-game rewards in form of so-called           marketing in Dota 2, League of Legends
influence points. It encourages players        is the winner in this round.
to invite their friends to play the game
and rewards are unlocked as soon as the
newly recruited player reaches a certain
level.

Chris Enock told [a]listdaily, that “most
League of Legends players join because         „Most League of Le-
they hear about the game from a friend.
Friends feel comfortable telling friends
                                               gends players join
about the game because they see Riot‘s         because they hear
regular improvements to the game expe-
rience.”                                       about the game from
While word-of-mouth is a mighty marke-
                                               a friend. Friends feel
ting tool, especially in virtually connec-     comfortable telling
ted communities, it is not easy to un-
derstand, why Valve did not implement          friends about the
a reward scheme for their recruiting
program yet. According to some sources
                                               game because they
the basics for such a model seem to be         see Riot‘s regular im-
integrated into the code of the game al-
ready but the feature is still not available   provements to the
to players.
                                               game experience.“

                                               Chris Enock, ‎
                                               VP of Central Publishing at Riot Games

Round 4:

Social Media Marketing

One key factor to the success of League      interacts way more with the content pos-
of Legends is its vast community. Riot       ted on the fansite than the average Dota
Games with 67 million claimed players        2-follower. It seems that Riot Games
per month beats its competitor Valve,        publishes more engaging content on a
with its just below 8 million players per    regular basis than the marketing guys at
month for Dota 2 by very far. Also the       Valve.
stats in the most important social media
channels Facebook and Twitter point          While the gamer-to-fan ratio is slightly
out a clear winner: over 11 million people   better in the Dota 2 community (27% of
are fans of the League of Legends main       all players are also Facebook fans, while
site, while Dota 2 gathered (still impres-   only 16% of all LoL-gamers also liked the
sive) 2 million likes. The followership on   title), the distribution by country of those
Twitter completes this picture: about        fans is quite interesting. While League
1.51M users follow the news about Riot       of Legends’ primary market is - accor-
Games’ MOBA-title while Valve’s flagship     ding to the Facebook stats - the United
reaches out to 297.000 folks.                States, Dota 2 draws its main body of
                                             fans from the Philippines. To an online
While the comparison seems not fair          marketing specialist this number could
as Dota 2 started some years later than      draw suspicion, as a high number of user
League of Legends which hit the market       accounts from the Philippines often hints
in October 2009, it is more interesting to   towards a non-organically grown follo-
have a look on how the two publishers        wership. But it seems that the original
interact and use their communities.          Dota already enjoyed a huge audience
                                             amongst Filipino gamers and that suc-
Riot Games actively encourages peo-          cess simply continues with Part 2.
ple hitting the “Like-Button” by offering
a free champion named Tristana as a          Community: Hardcore vs. Casual
reward. According to Facebook statistics,
the fandom of League of Legends also         The question whether Dota 2 attracts
                                             more hardcore gamers than League of
                                             Legends or not is hard to answer as it
                                             is not easily to measure. Because of its
                                             plus of tactical options Dota 2 is often
                                             considered more complex than LoL
                                             by many critics. The theory is that Riot

Games can attract more casual gamers           Enabling engaged fans to produce and
with its title and thus reach a broader        sell their own works to successful ga-
audience on social media channels than         ming titles ties them even closer to the
Dota 2. Because it is hard to prove and        games and the publisher and adds to a
often more philosophy than science, we         common brand experience by making
cannot really comment on the impact on         them part of the success of a certain
the marketing success it might have.           title.

User generated content drives marke-
ting
                                               Riot Games: 1, Valve: 0
Using Steam as its distribution platform,
Valve can benefit from its steamworker         At first glance this point goes straight to
feature: users generate their own con-         Riot Games as they are able to engage
tent for their favorite games and sell it to   their larger community better than Valve.
the included marketplace. According to         But taking the user generated gaming
Valve, contributors of fan-made in-game        content into account, this is a head-to-
items earned $15.000 in average in the         head-race.
year 2013.

Round 5:

Storytelling

Valve’s Prize Pool Strategy                 The prize money for the League of
                                            Legends World Championship usually
Setting the record for the highest prize    ranges around $2M while number of
pool in eSports history with almost $11     teams and players in the competition
millions for The International 4, Valve     were almost the same in both games.
created a marketing story with an impact    The prize pool of The International 4 was
way beyond gaming related newsfeeds.        funded by the community in huge parts.
The impressive figure did not only cata-    Valve started the 2014 compendium
pult Dota 2 to the event horizon of main-   sales and $2.50 of each purchase were
stream media but helped to raise aware-     added to the pool immediately. It still has
ness of eSports in general.                 to be proven if this engagement of the
                                            fandom can be replicated 2015 or if the
It’s undoubted that this move brought       game might have to face negative con-
a lot of attention to the game, but there   sequences of a much lower reward for
are reasons why Dota 2’s biggest rival,     the winning teams.
League of Legends, did not join the race
to the moon of staggering prize pools.      Documenting the life of a pro-gamer
In an interview with video gaming web-
site Polygon back in August 2014, Jason     eSports tells stories. Combined with
Yeh, head of EU eSports at Riot Games,      maybe the most powerful storytelling
stated that the publishers of League of     tool of our days — the movies — these
Legends are aiming for a more sustai-       stories can come to life. Proven by Valve
nable growth of the professional gaming     in March 2014 with the release of their
branch of their title. While Valve seems    documentary “Free to play”. With over
to focus on a major annually event with     2.8 million views the feature film can be
an extraordinary prize pool, Riot Games     regarded as a very successful marke-
plans to have big pro-gamer events on a     ting asset and — maybe inspired by this
weekly basis that could not be sustained    approach — Riot Games started its own
with such huge funds needed for each        three-part series called “Road to Worlds”
tournament final.                           in September of the same year, quickly
                                            reaching over 1.6 million viewers.

Both publishers use their films to promo-
te their largest tournament series. While
Valve focuses on The International, Riot       Riot Games: 0, Valve: 1
games released their documentary as
an introduction to their World Champion-       While Riot Games’ strategy here seems
ship finals in South Korea. The title of the   reasonable, the stories created by Valve
third episode points it out: “The Road to      definitely had a huge impact. Maybe they
Seoul”.                                        will not be able to maintain this pace in
                                               the future, but for today —Valve is the
With those movies, Riot Games and              clear winner in storytelling.
Valve started to include high end media
productions into their content marke-
ting strategies, well received by their
audiences and additionally bridging the
gap between special interest in gaming
and the mainstream. It gave the latter an
opportunity to get a glimpse of the still
to be recognized world of pro-gaming.

Round 6:

Good old basics

Let’s add some classic advertising           the more expensive marketing expenses
                                             in the strategy of Riot Games but clearly
While the emphasis on community mar-         following their approach described ear-
keting is heavy, League of Legends is        lier in this article: to provide remarkable
also using some classic forms of mar-        events in short time intervals.
keting. Everybody surfing the typical
gaming sites came across a LoL ad for        Steam: using an existing sales channel
sure and if you google for League of Le-
gends, even Google AdWords-ads pop           One big advantage of the marketers at
up and lead you to a sign-up page. Com-      Valve is their distribution channel Steam.
pared to the efficiency of word of mouth       Already the beta key for Dota 2 was pro-
and social media marketing, those me-        moted via Steam and every Steam user
thods are an addition to the campaign        was flooded with information and down-
and help to increase awareness in target     load opportunities for this game. With
groups a little further away from the core   100 million active users and over 8 milli-
audience of the game.                        on concurrent users (by June 2014), this
                                             is an enormous resource for the marke-
Gaming Events and Trade-fairs                ting of a game at the hands of Valve.

The League of Legends presence at
gamescom 2014 in Cologne was impres-
sive. The arena-like setup was home of       Riot Games: 0, Valve: 1
the EU-LCS region finals with seating for
almost 2.500 people. This setup caught       With classic advertising only comple-
the attention not only of League of Le-      mentary to its marketing and its arena-
gends-fans but demonstrated fairly well      events being part of the event marketing
how dominant eSports is in the contem-       strategy discussed earlier, Riot Games
porary gaming market. For sure one of        loses this point to Valve for having the
                                             biggest distribution channel available:
                                             Steam.

League of Legends @ gamescom

It‘s a tie!

Who wins the battle?
Riot Games: 4 points, Valve: 4 points.

There is no easy answer! Of course,          Each case is an interesting example of
League of Legends is far ahead by num-       modern marketing not only for compu-
bers so one can tell that their marketing    ter games. A lot of consumer brands are
strategy is pretty effective. But breaking   striving to enable strategies like these
down the competition to judging their        for their own products. Of course the
strategies only, no clear winner can be      audience of gamers and eSports enthu-
announced. Both publishers base their        siasts is very special and a grateful re-
strategy heavily on consumer engage-         source for any marketing team, but with
ment, social media and content mar-          eSports rising, these effective channels
keting and less on classic advertising.      become more and more interesting to
The element of storytelling plays an         brand managers and their marketing
important role while both approach this      strategies important assets to the com-
on different paths. In some cases both       pany value of the publishers.
companies are influencing each other,
for example with the idea of making a
documentary about their pro-gamers.

A comparison by numbers

League of Legends                  Dota 2
Free to Play                       Free to Play
(10 Champions from start)          (all Champions from start)

Releasedate                        Releasedate
October 27th, 2009                 July 9th, 2013

Concurrent players                 Concurrent players
7.500.000                          642.000

Players per month                  Players per month
67.000.000                         7.860.000

Highest prize pool 2014            Highest prize pool 2014
$2.110.000                         $10.931.103

Facebook fans on main site         Facebook fans on main site
11.350.000+                        2.093.000+
(16% of players)                   (27% of players)

Twitter follower in main channel   Twitter follower in main channel
1.510.000+                         297.000+
(2,2% of players)                  (3,8% of players)

Sources

http://www.gamesbrief.com/

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/dota-2-players-now-outnum-

ber-world-of-warcraft-subscribers/1100-6419431/

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-04-22-dont-be-sur-

prised-that-just-2-2-per-cent-of-f2p-players-spend-money

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-04-09-only-2-2-per-

cent-of-free-to-play-users-ever-pay-report

http://www.ongamers.com/articles/dota-2-7th-march-patch-

content-analysis/1100-1001/

http://www.alistdaily.com/news/exclusive-publisher-20-ndash-

riot-and-the-rise-of-the-player-community

http://ap.ign.com/en/feature/60304/overview-gaming-in-the-

philippines

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/11/why-is-dota-

2-the-biggest-game-on-steam/

http://www.pcgames.de/Dota-2-PC-236099/News/Steam-

Workshop-Fans-verdienten-2013-mit-Ingame-Items-durchschnitt-

lich-15000-US-Dollar-1105530/

http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/18/6006727/riot-games-

league-of-legends-valve-dota-prize-pool-international

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/469733/steam-

reaches-8-million-concurrent-users/

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