A poor job of Riot control | 10 Years Ago This Month

20.12.2023 - 19:09 / gamesindustry.biz / John Riccitiello / Unity Ceo

The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.

Looking back on the 10 Years Ago This Month columns covering 2013, there's a recurring theme of companies attempting significant power grabs and hilariously falling flat on their face in the process.

You saw it with the bungled launch of EA's SimCity, with an always-online requirement that was widely assumed (and later confirmed) to be a fig leaf excuse to slap some DRM on a game that didn't need it.

You saw it all year long with the Xbox One, which "lost the worst generation to lose" in part because Microsoft tried to upend the status quo to cut out second-hand game sales in an industry that was beginning an inexorable shift to digital distribution anyway.

And while Unity's outrageously over-reaching Runtime Fee debacle (and subsequent sheepish backtracking) didn't happen until this year, you could arguably see the foundations of it – and future Unity CEO John Riccitiello's contortionist-like talent for shifting positions – foreshadowed in Riccitiello's 2013 comments, where he trash-talked opportunists and monetization-obsessed mobile games built on grinding players hooked into a routine, only to become Unity's CEO and spend the next nine years growing the company by doing its very best to enable opportunists and monetization-obsessed mobile games built on grinding players hooked into a routine.

So it's only fitting that we finish off the 2013 batch of 10 Years Ago This Month columns with another quickly regretted power grab, as League of Legends maker Riot Games decided it was big enough to ban League of Legends pro players from livestreaming a selection of other games, mostly consisting of competitors in the MOBA genre.

Naturally, the list of forbidden titles leaked immediately, and made Riot look less like the industry-leading esports company it was and more like an insecure also-ran terrified that people might realize MOBA is an actual genre with alternatives to League of Legends.

Looking at the list, I get why DOTA 2 and Blizzard's games are on there, but a lot of these games were clearly not going to be threatening League of Legends heading into 2014.

Gas Powered Games' Demigod came out in 2009 and is best-remembered (by me, anyway) for retailers breaking street date and servers falling over at launch. It's been available on Steam since 2011 and has 890