24H Challenge: Legends of Runeterra

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The League of Legends broadcast (dedicated to the game turning ten years old) has brought an incredible number of new game announcements. Among them were both the early versions of projects (known only by codenames) and almost finished products. The first game that came out was the Legends of Runeterra.

In general, LoR is a classic collectible card game. The studio used the universe of its main game, LoL, as the basis for CCG. The world of Runeterra has turned out to be rich in lore and presented a large number of interesting cards.

The game itself is a cross between MTG: Arena and Hearthstone. It has attack and defense steps just like MTG, but at the same time we are not tied to land cards. It seems to us that this has resulted in an extremely interesting hybrid of mechanics.

The main characters of League of Legends universe are central to deck-building and future match strategies. However, according to the developers, the card game already has characters not present in the studio's strategy itself. They also added that in the future these characters will head out to the battlefield as well.

Overall, the release of the game on Twitch was successful. The category's peak viewers figure was equal to 229 thousand people. This is given that access to the CCG was opened at 2 AM (GMT). Toward morning, the figure fell to 80-90 thousand, and in the evening of the same day it grew to 160 thousand viewers.

The news regarding the channels are also extremely positive. On release, their number amounted to 255 channels total. With the passage of time and the new players being admitted to the game, this indicator kept on increasing and after 24 hours amounted to 559 unique channel pages.

The results of Legends of Runeterra are worth comparing with those of the main competitors – MTG, Artifact and Hearthstone. However, as of today Artifact is not really expected to put up a fight of any sort: Valve's game has long been occupying the very bottom spots of the ranking.

Based on the peak viewers, the new creation of Riot Games is second only to Hearthstone. The difference between them is equal to 21%. The other two games are significantly behind LoR. In the case of MTG, it is 32% behind, while Artifact stays as much as 70% behind.

Regarding the peak of channels, everything is a bit different. This time, Legends of Runeterra is inferior to both Hearthstone and Artifact. Blizzard’s game has an advantage of 1,015 channels, while CCG from Valve has an advantage of 1,034 channels. LoR surpasses only Magic: The Gathering, as the result of the latter was 128 channels behind.

All these comparisons with game's direct competitors are quite interesting. Especially given that the statistics were taken from the very moment of release. The new card game from Riot Games is a great competitor to the titans of the genre, but this is only the beginning.