For a good decade, Blizzard Entertainment has been the undisputed champion of developing and publishing prestige PC games. Warcraft, World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Overwatch, Diablo, and Hearthstone (we can maybe skip Heroes of the Storm, sorry) have sat at more or less the top of their respective genres for years. In some cases, decades. Blizzard was way ahead of the curve in setting up, in Battle.net, a kind of storefront-launcher across its multiple games. It has an annual convention, in BlizzCon, where thousands gather to cosplay as their favourite Blizzard characters and cheer the most minuscule of announcements. Most of all, it's one of the only developer-publishers whose name carries the same kind of "seal of quality" weight that you could apply to the likes of Nintendo. But things change, and a new challenger approaches. A plucky, independent little studio called Riot Games fancies a pop at the title.
The background here is really quite delicious, too. For the unfamiliar, back in 2002 Blizzard released the popular, influential real-time strategy game Warcraft 3, and then in 2003 some modders came along and made a new mode of their own for it called Defence of the Ancients, a kind of weird tower defense evolution of the RTS (and they actually made it with the official world editor which is why, you'd imagine, Blizzard was so aggressive with its terms and conditions in the recent Warcraft 3: Reforged). After the Defence of the Ancients mod gained huge popularity, rival company Valve bought the rights to it - much to Blizzard's chagrin - and hired one of the mod's major developers, the pseudonymous "IceFrog", to make Dota 2 for them in 2009. Another designer of the mod, Steve "Guinsoo" Feak, who worked on it even before IceFrog, went on to join Riot's co-founders - a couple of ambitious, business school dorm-buddies called Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck - and made League of Legends.
Now, Dota 2 is handing out prizes in the tens of millions to its tournament winners and Valve of course has a near total monopoly on the PC gaming storefront. Riot's League of Legends is frequently the most-watched game on Twitch, is probably the biggest esport in the world, and probably the biggest game in the world too. As of August 2019, League is averaging peaks of eight million concurrent players worldwide. Meanwhile, at Blizzard, the remaster of Warcraft 3 launched to criticism and controversy, the RTS as a genre is in the worst shape it's ever been, and the company is still getting over the huge protests from both fans and its own staff for the handling of Ng Wai Chung, or "Blitzchung" - one of its own professional players.