Riot and Profit

#1

Aayan

"Many companies forget what it means to make great products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over and the product people eventually make their way out."

Feels like this applies to Riot and Valorant nowadays, it feels like their philosophy has become to push for profit only, whereas before it felt like their strategy was to make the player base as happy as possible, with the expectation that they'd then be willing to spend money.

This is regarding the game itself and not really VCT, but I think you could also expand it to what's been going on in LoL recently

#2

yukky

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Bump

#3

Aayan

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thanks goat

#4

nobody___100

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aayan never misses 👑

#5

NRGSUPERFAN

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dont think any ascension team this year got a classic skin, they couldnt have been bothered to change a few colours im dead

#6

ASL887

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i think they clearly only want profit after charging 50 pounds for some ugly karambit and slacking on the vct bundles with the player banners. I fully align myself with Aayan's position.

#7

ash_knuckles

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part of the reason why valve isn't publicly tradeable

#8

m1kah

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tencent owns riot. this should be expected

#9

bees

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Not to be a Riot defender but I genuinely don't understand where these sentiments come from. Valorant in 2025 doesn't feel any worse to me than Valorant in 2022. Besides a replay system, what exactly do people want?

#10

Laundry

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I think it's much more in LoL
back then it was also a lot more justifiable because Val was so new, but so few of the communities requests (custon maps, replay system, etc) have been added. Last request I remember them following was them adding more pink skins 😭

#12

bees

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The replay system being this far overdue is a pretty egregious mistake, but these things happen. It wasn't an intentional delay.

And frankly, I don't trust fans to make good maps for a game like this. It'd be a cool thing to have for the sake of creativity, but it would take a lot of manpower to release a custom map creator and most of the community probably would not engage with it.

#14

Laundry

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I think the replay system being late is a fault of Riot management and resource allocation. It's something that isn't going to bring new players to the game or cause people to buy skins, but it's something that takes A LOT of resources and time to develop, and so I think Riot intentionally prioritized it less because the only reason to make it was because so many players were asking for it.

For the maps, sure so many players wouldn't use the maker, but 99% of players would definitely play custom maps/modes. Look at like CS or FN for example

There's also a lot of other that the community has asked for such as:

Bring back replication
Bring back snowball mode
Make skin prices more reasonable
Change radianite system (I lowkey agree with riot on this tho)
Be more transparent about nerfs/buffs (have gotten better with this)
Better ranked rewards
Fire Leo Faria or fix the T2 system
Fix the mickey mousness of kickoff & first International

this is just the top of my head, there is so much more tho

#15

bees

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I mean yeah they've explicitly said the first few years of the game's life were in a
launching mentality where they're just focused on getting the game to a popular, playable state, and that now they're in more of a sustaining phase where they can focus on the game's longevity. I trust them to get more of these luxury things done with time but gamers are just impatient.

I don't know enough about tier 2 to argue that tbh

#11

Laundry

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We Are Player First
Everything we do is in service of players. This continuous focus inspires the most meaningful and lasting game experiences.

This was riots original main philosophy, to actually be a big company that actually listens to players but it feels more and more like riot is straying from the original ideal. We hold Riot to a high standard I do admit, but that is how meaningful change happens

#13

bees

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Aside from failing to deliver the replay system, I don't see how they aren't listening to players. The game is fairly well-balanced, has high-quality servers, very few bugs and cheaters, and (in my experience) consistent punishment for toxic behavior, which is something they've become stricter on because they listened to players.

They're doing a much better job of planning for long-term life of the game than most other competitive shooters. Most of the issues with valorant have been because of the community, as opposed to bad decisions by devs like with Apex and OW.

#16

JesusisLord

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I understand your view but also others, I believe their points are the lack of change and recent media concerning Riot that explain about the larger resource allocation into skins than the gameplay, people don't consider new agents or maps as game updates, so to a lot of people nothing has changed in years.

I personally believe Riot should try and actually change the game in some shape or form, but I agree with you, I believe Riot are planning to do this, but it takes time, same way fortnite didn't release with creator or custom maps or more, just people are tired of the "same game".

#17

ButterflyEffect23

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someone cooked here

#18

Gemiknight

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very true