League of Legends evolves to be less like Elden Ring

Plus: Microsoft executives flew to Brussels to push $69 billion merger

Thank you so much for all of the support, readers! This newsletter, which just turned one month old, is growing rapidly and I’m pouring more time and resources into it, as a result. More than ever, it feels like newsletters are a rare, financially viable path forward in journalism.

Below, we have some news du jour, du semaine¹, followed by a League of Legends deep dive. Cheers!²

On Tuesday, Microsoft met with European Union antitrust regulators in a closed hearing. Company executives were busy in Brussels this week, pleading a case for the nearly $69 billion Activision Blizzard deal to go through. This resulted in Xbox revealing some interesting facts, such as that PlayStation has 5 times more exclusive titles than Xbox: 286 to 59. See slide below.

According to my former Verge colleague Tom Warren, this slide was replaced by one about Call of Duty coming to 150 million people instead.

Tom Warren @tomwarren

fun fact: Microsoft was going to show this slide at its Activision acquisition press conference in Brussels earlier this week. It was replaced with one about the potential of bringing Call of Duty to 150 million more people instead

Microsoft president Brad Smith also said that Microsoft has 58 games on PlayStation, while Sony only has two on Xbox.

It’s not the first time Microsoft has been willing to highlight business shortcomings, in order to push the Activision Blizzard deal forward.

Last October, I wrote for The Washington Post about how Microsoft had spent years testing and demoing its cloud gaming service, only to call the technology “immature” and “unproven” in a filing to the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in defense of the merger. Microsoft was responding to antitrust authorities’ concerns that the Activision acquisition could potentially improve Xbox’s cloud gaming offering, Project xCloud, and stifle market competition.

The contrast was stark between an E3 2019 Project xCloud event I attended that celebrated cloud gaming, and the filing, which said that gamers don’t actually care if their games are stored in the cloud, so the technology has to win them over via superior game content and graphics.

The EU’s antitrust scrutiny runs parallel to similar efforts from the U.S.’s Federal Trade Commission and the British CMA.

Peter Whelan, a professor of law at the University of Leeds, told me he believes that the CMA finds the merger “problematic for consumer welfare” and that it could lead to higher prices, reduced choices or less innovation for customers in the U.K.

The CMA’s decision is due on April 26.

Whelan said that it’s possible the merger will still go through if the CMA asks Microsoft for certain remedies. Those remedies could be to ask the company to divest certain parts of Activision Blizzard, such as the studios that make Call of Duty.

Smith said on Tuesday that Microsoft doesn’t see a viable path to divesting Call of Duty.

Exclusive: How League is changing from its original intent

League of Legends is slowly transforming these days. Here’s my long-awaited newsletter story on how.³

When my friends try to game with me, they’re always faced with the conundrum: Do I really want to learn League of Legends just to play with Shannon? And how they respond is truly a mixed bag. Some play with unearned confidence, others shy away entirely, some entertain the idea as a joke but then never play. The main obstacle is how unfriendly the game is to beginners. This is an issue I’ve documented at Rift Herald (rest in peace) and at The Washington Post (bemused a lot of gamers with that one).

Riot knows, which is one of the reasons it launched Wild Rift in 2021, a mobile, pared down version.

More recently, the company has also tweaked League of Legends on PC and added some very long-awaited quality of life improvements. There are over 160 champions in League, and playing the game involves knowing the right runes to equip, items and more. League already added item suggestions several years ago, and it’s now added rune predictors. 

It’s wild that League didn’t have this feature for over a decade. It’s been so long that a whole cottage industry of fan sites and other useful tools have spawned around League in the years it didn’t have rune prediction. Before, if I wanted to know what runes a champion like Kha'zix needs to equip, I would go on fan sites like op.gg or Mobalytics and click into a guide. Now, this information is readily available in the game.

But that’s the interesting tension Riot has always found with League — that the game’s complexity is also a feature that some fans enjoy. They don’t necessarily want to make the game too obvious and easy, even though lowering the difficulty would likely help attract new players.

I’m reminded of an insight I learned from an hour-long interview I did with former executive producer of Wild Rift, Michael Chow, back in April of 2021. I asked Chow if the team would add a tutorial for beginners to figure out what to do in Wild Rift after the early game. He said they had a few in place already, but that he wanted players to also figure it out for themselves.

Shannon Liao: “There’s a part of the game that beginners don’t get, which is after the laning phase, which is, ‘What do they do?’ Do they go to the dragon, do they go to the baron? I feel like the people I played against, these strangers, were confused. Do you think there would be more support for them or additional tutorials?”

Michael Chow: “So we have a couple of tutorials for Dragon and Baron. The thing I’ll say is, I have the unconventional perspective on stuff like this, which is rather than improve our tutorial on this, I’d almost rather us make it more fun to discover these things with your friends. More rewarding, more easy, more fun for your friends to teach you this stuff. Similarly, there’s a strong community of players that try and help players get better at the game, and there are even businesses that spin up around this, like Skill Capped, ProGuides, etc. I almost feel like it’s more powerful for us to empower our players to really teach each other how to play the game.”

So League of Legends, but make it Elden Ring. (I’m kidding.)

Chow is no longer with Riot, but I did speak to Riot in January about why they added the rune predictor feature.