I would.
Riot's not taking the path of 'most enjoyment' they're taking the path of 'most money', which is exactly what happened when Maplestory catered to eastern audiences over western.
Fewer people play it than ever, yet they're making more money. In time, Riot's going to fall into the same rut that maplestory is in...except new player experience sucks, and eventually they'll drive away dedicated fans in favor of the greater profits made on new players. Once the game stops being as popular, this tactic will fail because nobody's going to encourage new players to keep playing and there's no incentive to CONTINUE spending, since the game fundamentally cannot go P2W like maplestory did.
Yeah, they're a business, but I'm of the opinion that in the field of entertainment, a quality product trumps making more money off a much less accessible product.
#The purpose of a game is enjoyment. The goal should be to optimize that, not optimize around spending habits of certain demographics. If you are successful, you are making a significant profit either way.
That's why most games are fucking trash now but developers are making more money than ever. Build hype for your game---> start crowdfunding after providing 'proof of concept', enable spending during your 'beta', or even both---> release---->quarter developer support-----> soak the money you can from it until it dies.
Alternatively, you can compare its path to SC2, which is hard to do since LoL is part of what killed SC2.
SC2 kept making balance changes to improve viewer experience, rather than player experience. Until after the game basically died, they pushed nothing but high APM death-ball builds (unless you're Protoss, then , just A-click your deathball), with the only exception being early-mid economic damage.
This basically ensured whoever got a slight lead early maintained that lead with the exception of a few checks and counters...but pro players tended to avoid things that were easily countered. Except Terran. They were forced to do a build that was potent but easily countered by the other races so everyone can PogChamp whoever won, whether they deserved it or not.
This made the game extremely binary in Terran match-ups except TvT, while Protoss was always binary except PvP, and Zerg was just the "sit and wait until late game" race unless it was ZvZ. Notice a pattern?
Riot has decided to make LoL binary for the sake of the viewer experience. If another game comes out that starts to compete with LoL's esports scene, LoL will surely die in the same sense that SC2 did.
It will live on, but at a massive decline from its original popularity.
