Riot says PvE modes aren’t profitable. Players have a different opinion on this.
Riot Games decided to abandon PvE modes some time ago. As the employees explained, they were unprofitable and attracted too little attention from players. Although they were popular at first, nobody played them in the end.
Now, a few years after the last mode, one of the Redditors pointed out that it is not possible to fully measure their popularity based on the number of players. There are many other factors to this.
PvE modes and their popularity
A new Star Guardian event is coming to League of Legends soon, but at the moment nothing is known about the dedicated mode that took place in 2017. Players were then able to join forces and face bots that wanted an invasion. The players liked the event a lot, but Riot – not so much. Due to the fact that these were popular only at the beginning, and then the gameplay decreased. For example, this is the interest graph of the different modes:
The community approaches this topic differently. Redditor Mazrim_reddit noted that Riot badly bases its business model and incorrectly suggests that only the number of players matters. There are definitely more factors that decide about it.
Events like Odyssey both directly sold skins and kept the playerbase overall engaged in an extra way – you don’t track that with raw player numbers.
Games are not valued just on their pure playtime, you don’t call a singleplayer campaign mode game a failure because people only played it once but said how much they liked it.
Later in the post, the author notes that PvE modes also generate publicity. The media write about them, discussions arise, artists create various graphics, and the whole thing had its own “soul”. Now the events are empty and only the number of skins sold counts.
In the comments, many players agreed that the author was right. Other fun events like the Nexus Siege or even the Ascension were mentioned. We already know that Riot Games has given up on maps other than Summoner’s Rift or Howling Abbys, and are reluctant to create new ones. This may change, but at the moment there is little chance.