Okay, time to go to business school for kiddies.
So, Tencent is the majority shareholder of Riot Games, in California.
What is a 'Majority Shareholder'
A majority shareholder is a person or entity that owns more than 50% of a company's outstanding shares. The majority shareholder is often the founder of the company, or in the case of long-established businesses, the founder's descendants. By virtue of controlling more than half of the voting interests in the company, the majority shareholder has a very significant influence in the business operations and strategic direction of the company.
What does that mean, then? It means that Tencent ( despite having no prior involvement in the game, no branches in America, none of that) is, more or less, in control of what happens at Riot. They may not care about small details and how things actually get done, but they dictate what happens in a broader sense. So, a lot of the things that happen now happen because of Tencent.
Now, an F2P company has very different design philosophies than a P2P game or traditional B2P (before DLC was a thing) game, regardless of the company controlling it:
F2P: In an F2P game, you make money through the cash shop -- most often cosmetic items, or minor QOL boosts / items that have no real impact on actual gameplay, but make the game far more accessible and feel better. So, because of this, most F2P games will make the base game (with no cash shop additions) very ugly, grindy and nearly unbearable. They will tease you with all these things that could be if you shell out a bit of money -- and, eventually people will give in, and then they'll tell their friends, and it starts a whole chain of people buying shit they don't need (and should have had by default).
So, because their income doesn't come from the base game itself, they largely ignore it, and only do the bare minimum work necessary to placate people who care. They will spend the majority of their resources and time in developing cash shop items / features, and throw out half-assed content / lore / design / what have you. In Anet (the company who runs GW2, owned by NCsoft (another Asian cash grab company)), teams are all given a quota of items they must design for the cash shop each month. If they fail to meet this quota, they are potentially fired. So, teams will literally drop any and all content they're working on in order to meet this quota. This means that the content that does come out is half-assed or takes a very long time to actually release.
Now, how does this apply to League? Well, they don't make money off of the game itself. So, they won't spend as much time making sure it's fun, balanced, fair and all that. Most of their time and effort will be put into selling skins / RP in general.
Balance, for example. People have been complaining about balance since the game came out, yet Riot has never really done much to address it. The easiest champions are rewarded far more than any of the harder ones, and champions like Zed, with every tool in the book, just continue on without any real nerfs (we get placebo changes sure, but nothing substantial). So, since balance doesn't make them money, they instead create FOTM waves (Tanks, assassins, AS stackers, mages, ADCs, a particular champ, etc.) to spike skin / RP sales, and repeat this process every few weeks at random times (to not be caught).
They spend what, 7 years to update Taric? In any competent team, that would take very little time. But, since that doesn't make them money (the cost outweighs the profit, since many people who play Taric already owned him), they put it on a back burner, and give it an hour or so every couple days. The result is the process, which should only take a week or two at most, taking years to complete. Then we have Jayce's hammer bug. Largely aesthetic, has no real effect on gameplay, and fixing it would consume time and resources and have no income potential. So, unless Jayce has a new skin come out that they hype, it will not be fixed -- despite being around since the champion was released.
So, even though League isn't P2W, they do suffer from the F2P philosophies of greed. Not only that, but they have to follow whatever Tencent tells them, and make so much each quarter.
Now, what about a P2P or traditional B2P game?
P2P / B2P (no cash shop): In a P2P game, you don't make money through your cash shop, rather, you make money by keeping people happy and playing your game. This means that, rather than finding out how much you can withhold from people before they break, you actually show a bit of passion about your work, and make sure the game is as good as it can be. You pour resources and dev time into the base game, pumping out great content that keeps people playing.
In an MMO, there is a bit of time gating, sure, but people wouldn't wait around if the subscription wasn't worth it. So, the developers put real effort into making quality, entertaining content that will keep people coming back for more and playing the game. There is no cash shop to suck developer resources away, so the content and base game itself gets the entirety of the attention. Instead of cash shop item quotas, there are development schedules for meaningful content -- usually spaced out enough to not overwhelm people, but also to be slow enough to have a steady stream of content.
In a traditional B2P game (before DLC), you had to get people hooked on your game so that they would want to buy the rest of the series. Otherwise, you made no money. So, you had to have engaging, fun gameplay and a story that pulled people in. You couldn't just sell some shitty game, rip a bunch of the game out, and then later resell those pieces as DLC, because the technology wasn't there. We had expansions, but that was still buying a physical game. This is the type of gaming that brought out Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Smash Bros., Final Fantasy, Sonic and all these other great games that we still have around today. They didn't become popular because they were cheap, greedy assholes who milked people for every penny -- instead, they became great because they were great games with great people behind them.
So, a company doesn't have to be P2W to be shitty and greedy, and Riot is most definitely a greedy, slimy company, that deserves to be demonized -- but companies like that are the norm these days. Passion and enthusiasm have died out in the industry, to be replaced by greed and selfishness. Some of the developers still care, but they have to do what the publisher / dev lead / CEO / producer say, and can't stay true to what they know is right.
Sad part is that we told everyone, 10+ years ago, that F2P was not a good thing, that it would destroy gaming. Unfortunately, people didn't listen to us. In the gimme generation, anything "free" is good, and the kids were just all over that. While I'd love a return to the golden age of gaming, I know that gaming died several years ago, to be replaced by the shallow, ugly cash grab we have today that wears its face.
Hopefully you understand why people call Riot greedy now (though I doubt you read more than a sentence). It's not because they're just upset, it's because Riot (and every company these days, even Nintendo) is a fucking slimy, sleazy ass company who can't do anything but try and milk people for all they've got. Beck (their CEO) doesn't even play the game, and never really has. So don't expect the company to ever give a damn, 'cause they won't.
