Do those games also have the ability to earn free skins at as rapid a pace as league? And a lot of those games are newer than League and/or not directly comparable. Dota 2 is the closest comparison due to age of game and whatnot since we can also consider original dota game.
OW was a game you had to buy - thus they made about 9 moderate to low cost skins worth of money just from selling the game. Moreover, they have all the income from Blizzard's other games to prop them up while Riot had to start from nothing. Also consider that OW is a fps - something more or at least equally comparable to COD or CSGO than it is to league or the other games you mention. Obviously in such a game all classes must be available for pvp without unlocking them via money or long grinding sessions.
Smite - smite is much newer. Again I believe, it started as a game you had to buy or that you had to grind similar to league or pay (to avoid grinding in the earliest days of the game) unlock characters quickly. Thus, it too has ways of making money other than a monthly subscription cost. Moreover, they are newer to the business, they haven't proven their long-term stability the way Riot has, and their decisions to make things free or pay therefore do not necessarily reflect good business; only time will tell if their approach is good.
Consider this - 99% of things in league can be unlocked for FREE. You didn't have to pay $60 or so for the game. You can unlock every champ, nearly every ward skin, and nearly every skin (legacy content etc. issues) for FREE simply by playing enough games. Yes, to unlock every single thing in the game would take more time than most players can afford, but most players also don't want every single thing in the game. In the real world, if you want something NOW, you generally pay MORE for it to get it NOW. This holds true in League, and I'm pretty damn sure it holds true in other games too. Moreover, Riot has just announced about changing rewards for leveling up an account to give players quicker access to champs, skins, etc. depending on what they prefer.
Their leveling takes less than half the time of HOT for instance past the first few hero levels in HOT. Moreover, HOT changed the requirements for ranked about a year and a half ago - right at the time I was reaching their old requirements to be able to play ranked and screwed a lot of players like myself over in the new requirements - allowing players who joined after us and put no more work into leveling than us to join ranked faster. No compensation to us for having spend our "free" in-game currency "correctly" to maximize our speed at being able to play ranked. And their stuff is far from free either. Riot does a far better job on most of their skins than HOT. Their champs are not priced any less fairly than heroes in HOT. But because everyone wants everything free NOW, Riot is changing stuff to make more meaningless "free stuff" or cheap stuff for blue essence to reflect HOT overloading their players with useless doodads like champ portraits - most of which is of moderate to garbage level quality in HOT. So, congratulations, Riot is giving you your wish and making tons more stuff to unlock quickly for free - hopefully not at the cost of making most of their stuff low quality like HOT.
