In the past decade, the biggest upheaval in the gaming world has been the explosion of Esports, which has become a sensation up to the present moment. It has changed many people’s perceptions of gaming; instead of burying themselves in a console game, people tend to seek out games that connect with many others and compete against each other.
And the two biggest names in Esports over the past decade are none other than Valve and Riot Games, with their fiercely competing titles DOTA2 and League of Legends. We would think, “Oh, they are competing against each other, how could one side agree to sell the other’s game on their platform?” That is certainly a well-known story that everyone believes to be true.
However, life is unpredictable, and even this story is no exception. League of Legends was once published on Valve’s Steam, even before DOTA2 was released by this giant. Back in 2010, Riot Games was still a small company with completely unknown developers, experimenting with a game called League of Legends.
The question for Riot at that time was how to get gamers to access their game? Gamers were used to sitting at their computers; selling discs at traditional game stores was ineffective, and Riot Games hadn’t yet figured out how to let gamers download and install the game online.
The solution at that time was for Riot Games to turn to the largest online game distribution system available, Valve’s Steam. Thus, League of Legends was first released on the Steam store in early 2010. A few months later, as Riot Games’ title rapidly gained popularity in North America and the company decided to allow players to download the game for free, they could publish the game themselves without relying on Valve and Steam anymore.
It is worth noting that at that time in 2010, DOTA2 was not even on anyone’s radar; people were still playing the Custom map DotA Allstars. It wasn’t until 2011 that The International 2011 event took place, and DOTA2 officially appeared, firing the first shot in the competition between Riot Games and Valve. And everything has continued to this day, with League of Legends and DOTA2 being the two largest Esports titles in the world.
There is a rather humorous fact that even though it has long been independently published, you can still play League of Legends through Steam at this very moment. In fact, if you search for the game name “League of Legends” on Steamcharts, League of Legends will still appear like any other game sold on Steam. The interesting part is that the number of players playing League of Legends through Steam is less than ten.
It goes to show that nothing is impossible in this world, even the most absurd things like Valve once selling League of Legends on Steam.