Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Why won't Riot games accept Bitcoin
by
Aswan
on 23/04/2014, 13:56:23 UTC
Anyone know?

It seems that anyone wanting to further the interests of Bitcoin would be pushing HARD for Riot to accept BTC.

If you don't know - Riot run League of Legends. It's by far the biggest game in the world, see here:



See it has 3 million individual users every month compared with about 600k playing the top 100 PC games on Steam.

They make their money by selling RP (Riot Points) that players use to buy character upgrades. People spends small fortunes on this crap. Look on e-bay, there are accounts for sale with literally hundreds of skins which equates to hundreds of $.

Now it's mainly kids that play this game, I guess lots of them take money from Daddy's credit card to buy this stuff, but surely this is a prime example of where Bitcoin (internet cash) could be king?

Put yourself in a 15 year old's position - you have no credit card so can't pay for RP with Paypal or Moneybookers, however you do have some cash and could buy some Bitcoin. Send to Riot, get the RP, everyone's happy.

Riot games must turn over millions of $ selling these skins, if 25% of that was Bitcoin it would be a big boost to the whole Bitcoin ecosystem.

Riots marketing strategy is to what makes their game so successful, mainly by elimination most, if not all competition in parts of the gaming industry.
They aggressively try to force contracts to gaming organizations and events making them drop the competitions games in the event, or making esports organizations drop teams from other games in order to receive a lot of money from riot games.
It's a pretty successful marketing strategy regardless of what people think about it.
This however is not possible with bitcoin because of the lack of a central authority over bitcoin they could force a contract upon to not engage in business activities with the competition.
That said, Bitcoin doesn't fit into their marketing strategy at all.
I wouldn't be surprised if companies competing with them would start accepting bitcoin in the not too distant future tho