...Are you kidding? LoL has been huge for years in NA. RIOT is an American company that was bought by Tencent. Leaving the market means they lose their entire dev team.
Investing 2 years after the game was first playable by the public counts as "giving money to create it", now?
That's at least 6 years after they'd have started development.
They invested before it was released, what are you talking about?
Tencent paid for it to be made
Edit: upon research you are talking about when Tencent became the owner. Not their investments to have the game made.
Not mentioned in a Washington Post article but
“ Over the summer of 2008, Merrill and Beck’s work seeking funds proved fruitful and the two landed $7 million more in funding from Benchmark and FirstMark Capital venture capital firms.”
/+ 10 mill from Tencent and prior to launch Tencent gave another 10 mill to buy out those investors
You're probably thinking the "full release" but the game was being played by the public for several years, and was quite popular for over year prior to the "official release". So, no. They didn't. Their investment came a full year after I'd already been playing the game.
The game was made already. They bought an existing product.
I can’t find anything suggesting the game was released prior to 2008
Riot released some video at sometime talking about how they had to cram to make the game even playable prior to the sales pitch so I really doubt it was made before that
What? League is consistently the top result of twitch. Even accounting for other regions, league is by far one of the largest games people watch in na. Big na streamers pull in thousands of viewers (doublelift, tyler1 for example)
There's not way you can say that game wasn't ever popular. Maybe it's never been the literal most popular, but it's definitely had a life as a majorly popular game. Large streaming views, tons of players, etc. I have no idea how it's doing now, but it definitely had a number of years of major popularity.