advertisement
Facebook
X
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Reddit

Did League of Legends win an MTN Business App of the Year award? No

Late on Thursday evening we received a list of the MTN Business App of the Year Awards winners for 2020.

Usually this list contains a smorgasbord of local developers who have grafted hard to make an app that appeals to a local audience.

Among the winners we noted this oddity:

“Best Gaming Solution: League of Legends – An augmented reality game where a character appears and casts a spell or attacks another character and solves a puzzle. This turn-based, player vs. player game features vivid animation and sees bigger impact as harder puzzles are solved.”

Now, we aren’t the biggest fans of League of Legends, but we are aware that it is not an augmented reality game that you can play on your smartphone.

Yes, League of Legends: Wild Rift is coming, but this is not that.

At first we thought this was a typo but then we were made aware of this tweet which was sent during the ceremony on Thursday evening.

After a morning of digging we have discovered that this game is in fact not League of Legends, but rather a different game that makes use of Riot Games’ assets.

The game is actually known as League of Legends Augmented Rift. Those last two words would’ve cleared up a lot of the confusion we were met with when we first saw the game’s name in MTN Business’ press release.

This is rather concerning, so we contacted Creative Space Media which manages the MTN Business App of the Year Awards who put us in touch with the developer, Luke Draper, who operates under the banner of Hero Entertainment.

The developer tells us that in order to create League of Legends Augmented Rift they worked with a division of Riot Games, Riot Forge.

“Riot Games started something called Riot Forge and that is the marketing and publishing side of Riot Games. Around the time I started building League of Legends Augmented Rift, Riot Forge put out a call looking for developers and game designers to play around with their IP, create concepts and send them through to us,” Draper tells us.

It’s through Riot Forge that the developer was able to create this game. According to Draper, Riot Forge is aware that he is using League of Legends assets.

So that clears that up, but what about the game?

To be completely honest it’s rather cool.

Players will need to complete a physical puzzle in the real world and scan it to summon a League of Legends Champion that deals damage to other players.

It’s a pretty cool implementation of League of Legends on mobile even if it is still very rough around the edges.

The developer tells us they are not selling the app or trying to make money off it just yet. All they are doing is trying to drum up some noise so that Riot Forge notices their game.

Why MTN Business chose to remove the “Augmented Rift” suffix from the game’s title in its press release to media however is beyond us. Mostly because that suffix would’ve immediately cleared up the confusion that we’ve experienced today.

We’ve asked MTN for clarification on how this mistake happened and when we receive a response we will update this story

advertisement

About Author

advertisement

Related News

advertisement