League of Legends developer Riot Games was once planning a spin-off card game called League of Legends: Supremacy. The CCG was outed by a hacker who took over Riot president Marc Merrill's Twitter account yesterday.
"Well, I think this would be a good time to show off Riot's card game, who wants to see pictures? 50 re-tweets for pictures," said the hacker after gaining control of Merrill's account (via PCGamesN). Merrill has over 30,000 followers so those re-tweets came rather quick. The hacker then released an image of League of Legends: Supremacy's login screen, seen above. The image shows two armies of Champions from LoL, including Ryze and Garen, about to come to blows.
The hacker, who identified himself as "Jason," said that Supremacy was a standalone game. He claims to have acquired the client and server source.
"Did I mention this game was fully completed, but never released?” Jason said. “Riot doesn’t want you to play this game."
He didn't reveal any details on Supremacy's features. It's easy to imagine what this game would look like, though. Players would assemble cards featuring LoL characters, items and abilities and duke it out with each other online. If LoL was any indication, it would be free-to-play with optional microtransactions.
Jason continued his info dump by releasing images of card templates and icons from the game. However, they've seen been removed. He also threatened to release a large file of card images unless Merrill told him not to. Merrill apparently did just that and managed to get his account back:
Merrill's tweets don't indicate whether or not Supremacy will ever see the light of day. The main takeaway from this whole episode, though, is that Riot is looking for a way to expand beyond their marquee title. They're trying to make League of Legends into a wider franchise.
It seems like they're taking a cue from Blizzard and exploring how they can leverage a successful brand to make a foray into different genres altogether. Blizzard managed to take their WarCraft real-time strategy series and build not only a separate StarCraft RTS series but also an MMORPG (World of Warcraft) and a digital card game (Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft). Riot could be able to do the same, considering how massively popular LoL has become over the past few years.
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