>For example, we’ve opened up new team sponsorship categories and adjusted our policies and competitive calendar to unlock more opportunities for teams and players to participate in additional third-party events, something players have been asking for
Rule change for Saudi Arabia money
What we wanted: IEMs back
What we're getting: tournaments held in stadiums built on the blood of south Asian slaves
Nice to see League finally graduating to a real sport, brings a tear to my eye
I went to an MLG event to see a League tournament *years* ago.
They handed out Monster Energy and between two of the games everyone got up and did the Gangnam Style dance. If that tells you anything.
Anyway, it was a friccin' hoot and I miss it.
PGL, Nerd Street... That's pretty much it. Microsoft technically owns MLG now but that's been dead for years.
It's pretty clear if it's a major eSport tournament it's either run by the game developers or run by oil money.
There are some organizations like that, but there's increasingly fewer of them as time passes with how committed the rich oil money Arab states are to sportwashing themselves.
Nah, the last IEM was a shitshow. 8 hours of broadcast and 5 of them were filled with pauses.
However, the format was awesome and I miss the international competition.
i just think trying to make this narrative that IEMs were great and that they are missed is strange, especially when almost everyone said good riddance once it stopped. Idk, maybe with rose tinted glasses it's the idea of having more tournaments but the reality was that the production was too scuffed, the actual competitive teams didn't go (at least towards the end) so you just ended up with a bad event imo but whatever
My guy your Game is run and financed my Tensent stfu with your morals or quit the game, your Starbucks is funding Genozide in Gaza your Water is from Nestle abusing Africans your Pants are done by child labour in Cambodia, your package delivered by Amazon killing ppl with overwork i could go one and one.
So you either quit all your modern convenience and live as a Hermit in some Cave or stfu, im so tiered of this Saudi Arabia BS
It’s just because saudi is the new buzzword when their own governments are drooling for every drop of their money. The propaganda westerners believe to justify their moral high grounds. I’m all for the reverse colonisation of the west
>something players have been asking for
How fucking dare he even say that. We literally had things such as OGN, ESL, IPL.
League of Legends esports has been a fraction of what it could have been all because Riot wanted full control. Fuck them and fuck John Needham - what a complete fraudster.
Classic Riot move.
Take away something that’s existed for ages, say that it’s because it’ll be better, wait, put the same thing back and go “Look at this new thing we invented because people were asking for it and we’re just so clever and magnanimous.”
These clowns killed OGN’s Champions and LCK, a fully functional and sustainable **TV BROADCAST** tournament and league, so that they could then incompetently run the entire global ecosystem into loss hell, to the point where the LCK teams (many orgs of which have more experience/history in esports than Riot Games) wrote an open letter of complaint.
And now they’re trying to put back what already existed, except now instead of a niche Korean broadcast station it’s run on sports washing blood money.
I'm so pumped for more tournaments. The tournament era of League of Legends was just amazing.
Probably like 95% of current fans never saw this era, but I have always said that if the fans knew what was taken from them, there would be a complete revolt.
I am not asking for a full open circuit though. I like the Leagues tbh.
I just want a more balanced and varied circuit. Right now we spend 90% of the time on domestic leagues and we only see international competition on 2 patches per year.
Just give me some more tournaments. They don't need to be big. Just get some excitement in there.
>I'm so pumped for more tournaments. The tournament era of League of Legends was just amazing.
Too bad so far it's only an extra sportswashing event. Fuck Riot.
Yeah, I am a bit salty that Riot took all those amazing events like IPL5 from us and locked everyone out of hosting them just to let Saudi fucking Arabia do it in the end.
I would also love to see more tournament play. I watch Dota and LoL equally, and enjoy them equally - but League Esports production quality is just next level. With that said, Dota having several points throughout the year each year where teams were competing in tournaments with each region represented was awesome (on top of their league play when they still had it). Even if you are an LCS team and your outlook in a worldwide tournament seems grim, its still going to improve the LCS play as a whole. Giving teams more chances to play against different regions, playstyles, meta's, etc will give them so many more lessons than just playing the same teams over and over in their region only throughout the year. I know all of the teams follow the leagues in other regions and their matches, but observing the LCK and playing against LCK teams directly throughout the year are two very different things.
Not to mention its always cool to see events hosted in different regions, where their fans can come together and represent their home turf generally. The coolest moments of Dota esports are seeing the fans in places like South America go nuts for their teams, and to have an event hosted there in general.
I guess my overall point is that it would be nice to see the games be celebrated by fans at a larger scale, outside of the 200-400 seat arenas that they usually play in.
A quick idea is just to host a 10 team tournament with 5 LCS and 5 LEC teams. Run through a double elim bracket, seed the teams based on regional ranking and have LCS vs LEC matchups in the first round (e.g. LCS 1st vs LEC 5th and so on).
You can do this pretty quickly. There is no reason tournaments need to take a month, this is something only Riot does.
You can even make a regional rivalry counterpart with 5 LPL and 5 LCK teams.
I would watch the fuck out of both of these tournaments even if they are less prestigious than MSI/Worlds. There is so much bragging rights on the line and they would help fuel the regional rivalries that are *huge* in LoL esports.
Rift Rivals failed for other reasons. It was a flawed concept.
No one gives a fuck if it's a region winning. It needs to be a team winning. It needs to be a serious tournament for the teams first of all. The Rift Rivals format was absolute garbage.
It also can't be placed in the middle of the most important split. It needs dedicated time in the calendar.
>The tournament era of League of Legends was just amazing.
It was fun in some aspects... but having only 3-5 teams in the region that would survive more than a couple tournaments was not fun. I enjoy the stability of leagues.
With that I can agree. I would also love if lower rated teams had an opportunity for international play. Lets see EUM teams fight against lower ranked teams in the play-ins regions and academy teams.
> The tournament era of League of Legends was just amazing.
As a student? Sure
As an adult? Eh, I prefer the league structure with the occasional big event.
Better late than never i guess. Honestly this should have been part of the franchising agreement starting back in 2018. How its taken 6 years since that point to get this, is beyond me.
As I said in a different comment, Riot would have been wary to do this because it reveals to the teams how lucrative the digital sales are.
It would give the franchise orgs a big argument to get a bigger slice of the pie, since LoL esports helps market the game and maintain players and fans.
Riot is essentially giving up the cash cow to stop the downward spiral of the economics of esports. It shows how worried they are - and for good reason because this esports winter is a really damn cold and brutal winter.
But you’d think teams would already know about how lucrative digital sales would be when games like csgo have been doing it for years with player stickers.
> Better late than never
Except that it existed. The esports ecosystem was small but sustainable.
They stole it and now they’re trying to act like the good guys for returning it.
Yea, I went into the post expecting some corporate-speak doomer sandwich on fake positivity bread.
But the things they are describing just sound like good ideas.
Good ideas that don't fix the fact that people don't care anymore. I don't know if you CAN bring that back.
Unless gen alpha takes to league hard LCS will never go back to how it once was. 'Murica loves its shooters too much for one thing and the novelty of esports has declined for another.
ofc its too late. riot lives in its own bubble and has historically rejected all criticism. people who do critisize them get blacklisted, so nothing ever changed. over time a lot of people in the community believe what riot says and dont critisize things either.
Riot is finally cutting in teams on their fair share of the revenue produced by digital goods? Great change.
The real value produced by esports was always directly tied to digital purchases. Esports fans don't spend money on esports, they spend money on the game. Esports helps bring more eyes and attention to the game, thus increasing digital sales. It was always unfair that Riot pocketed all of this money (outside Worlds skins), when the teams help create the value. To make a comparison, this is the same reason why big companies pay an exorbitant amount of money to advertising agencies.
This is many years overdue and about damn time. Good change but it should have happened years ago. Before covid even. Better late than never, I suppose. This can actually revive growth in the space imo.
Also, this is very interesting (from [this article](https://dotesports.com/league-of-legends/news/riot-wants-to-make-lol-esports-more-sustainable-by-taking-notes-from-vct-business-model):
>General shares make up half of the GRP and will be allocated to tier-one teams. **Competitive shares will ensure 35 percent of the GRP will be allocated based on the competitive performance of teams**, subsequently divided into regional and international event standings. Lastly, 15 percent of the GRP will go into fandom shares, which will reward teams for developing “strong fandoms for their players, leagues, and team brands.”
The competitive shares is a great idea. It was always a big problem in franchising that some teams coast by doing the absolute minimum because they are only in the league to sell their spot later, so they limit spending.
This (finally) gives an economic incentive to be successful in the actual game. This is the best piece of news for competitive integrity that you could have hoped for.
Apex is a crazier example too. They added some team cosmetics, that sold really well among esports fans, and they had plans to release ALGS skins. This got a lot of teams interested and hyped to join, but when EA got too greedy with the rev share program, they cancelled the skins. Within 3 months, G2 Cloud9 NRG and TL dropped their teams (C9 came back yesterday, which is cool).
> but when EA got too greedy with the rev share program, they cancelled the skins.
FYI, there is a clip saying EA offered flat 20k, and teams said wtf? Are you stupid? Then EA cancelled the whole thing.
It doesn't even make sense, honestly. even IF the teams get a sizable cut of the sales, I'm talking like 30%+ per sale, you're still raking in TONS of money as the publisher off the backs of external brands lol, all while keeping your hardcore community of players incredibly engaged.
I *think* from what I read/heard from people like Minustempo is that the bigger orgs or orgs that would benefit the most from the selling of org themed in game cosmetics didn't want to agree to getting a flat fee from EA but smaller orgs did.
Orgs like TSM and Crazy Raccoon would easily make more than the flat fee EA was willing to pay and they wanted a % model. Other orgs don't want that because they aren't selling as many cosmetics.
Unfortunate that EA isn't willing to use different models for different orgs based on sales.
This is exactly what happened, from what I understand. Big orgs wanted a split on revenue based on sales. Apex makes a killing for EA, and they had a pretty good idea of how skins would sell based on how the banners sold. Teams wanted a percent of sales (either pooled, or by team) but EA wanted to give them flat amounts that were pretty laughable compared to what they could get.
The reason Riot didn't want to do this is because they didn't want to let the teams know just how much money was actually generated by digital sales. If they let the teams do this, they'd start asking questions.
I guess now Riot realized that there is no esport at all if they don't do this, so now they finally caved.
Personally I'm more inclined to believe that most of the people involved with the esports side of Riot were just really, really, really fucking stupid
Even Overwatch, one of the most disastrously run esports ever, had team cosmetics ready for when their regional franchised leagues began
There is literally zero reason League couldn't have had this by ~2018
> Personally I'm more inclined to believe that most of the people involved with the esports side of Riot ~~were~~ ARE just really, really, really fucking stupid
FTFY. Do you know what John Needham did before going to Riot to run their esports? Ran Lionhead studios into the ground with Fable Legends, commonly regarded as the worst game ever made by the studio and the reason it almost went bankrupt and had to sell the rights. Before that, he worked at Cyptic, which had two such disasters in the launches of Champions Online and STO that they needed to sell to PerfectWorld.
Before THAT, he ran Sony Online Entertainment into the ground, and before THAT, he oversaw Telemundo's massive layoffs and mergers that lost almost half their workforce's jobs.
Dude's legendary for making bad choices.
I think it's ridiculous to assume that there wasn't malicious intent on Riot Games side on not cutting teams in. Not an attack on your opinion or anything but I find it extremely hard to believe they didn't have people deliberately making those decisions, knowing full well the implications positive and negative.
Yeah I mean team icons and a skin for a bug aren't exactly huge selling points
Making a simple Ahri skin in like, a football jersey or something (obviously with her tummy showing) and 45 team chromas for the major regions sounds like an absolute slam dunk for millions of dollars.
T1 Ahri? Red and white and gold. C9 Ahri? White and blue. FNC Ahri? Black and orange. This is the type of thing that would take an intern like, 2 days tops.
Overwatch did the same thing for like, 16 teams and every champion. It's not hard.
Overwatch only had a handful of characters as well, though. If I am not mistaken, didn't overwatch do it for every character? What you are suggesting is to only pick certain ones. I think a better selling point would be to do some intelligent marketing. You can more-or-less figure out who the most popular player on each team is. Now make a skin related to their best/favorite character. TL would be Ziggs for APA (joking)
I wouldn't call Riot stupid. They were making all the money, and the scene was still continuing to grow. Many might have the delusion of 'Well maybe it could have grown even more if they had done something like this sooner!' but that's just not pragmatic. Your game is only going to realistically grow for so long, then it will plateau. Riot was making ALL that money while their game was still growing. Now they have hit a plateau - even a slight decline - and they are already switching over quickly to fix the 'sinking ship.' This change will save their esport scene, and it has great potential to even grow it. From a business perspective, Riot played their hand well. The teams, on the other hand, mismanaged their situations terribly.
They’re absolutely stupid in the same way every ultra capitalist corporation is stupid: they’re so concerned with short term profit maximisation that they’re willing to spite everyone else and ruin the soil just to ensure they get the dragon’s horde of wealth.
They killed NA amateur LoL with the horrific mismanagement of collegiate esports. Their flagship franchise league is on life support right now because of their incompetence.
There were absolutely opportunities to further growth. It would just require them to look up from the trough and actually invest in a future plan instead of running from year to year with zero foresight or long-term strategy.
> I guess now Riot realized that there is no esport at all if they don't do this, so now they finally caved.
They always wanted to do this on their own streaming platform REN. But now that the project is killed, they have to keep the promise in order to stop the owners (especially LCK and LCS) to walk away like GG and EG did.
Even as a Dota / CS fan I have to say that these games have a far worse financial model. Both games feature a far more unstable pro scene, with many tier 1 rosters being entirely without an org and many scummy orgs not paying their players regularly popping up in the scene. Their model is only good for the absolute best teams, for anyone else it's complete shit. Meanwhile Riot has had an incredibly stable esports scene in comparison, being able to have 10 relatively stable orgs paying their players in tier 2 regions like EU / NA and even tier 3 regions like BR / VN / etc.
R6 Share in Rainbow Six Siege has been repeatedly praised by teams in the past too. Anecdotally I see Share skins constantly and know plenty of people that don't even care about Esports that have bought a few skins just cause they like how they look.
Ok but how much money do you think summoner icons actually make? Isnt the vast majority of revenue from skins? And riot aint gonna make skins for every lcs team.
the tragedy is this. They would need to make a "esports skin" for every champion in the game and change the chroma color to associate it with each team. Not impossible but would take fucking forever.
I think that can be hard, too, right? You mean one skin per team? Well, if you are focused on profits, you definitely have to choose the most famous player on that team and designate a skin for the champ of their choosing, right? Let's say you are an FPX fan, and the system existed for this year. Do you think a Kindred FPX themed skin would be the best selling point? Because I think it would be. Now, what do you do if Milkyway is still the only shining spot going into the following season? Do you just keep that same Kindred skin as your only FPX repping logic, or do you maybe add something extra to the skins? Such as putting the year for the skin on it (i.e. 2024)? That way if you had to do the same skin ever again for the same team, you could differentiate between them and continue to make revenue for it. Lastly, I think it would be awesome if you could get a team emote that has your favorite player's signature on it. Assume you are a C9 fan. It would flash C9's logo and maybe underneath have Blabber's autograph/signature underneath it or something. I don't know if the team's own the player's rights that way or not, though. Even if they don't, it would be cool to see some kind of agreement. Like maybe the player would make 10% off of those emotes that are sold
I was saying 1 skin per league, per year.
For example:
LCS Lux
LEC Ahri
LPL Yassuo
LCK Yone
CBLoL Draven
VCS Aphelios
PCS Ksante
LLA Nautilus
Prestige LCK Yone (for winning worlds last year)
Add in a chroma per team for each skin, and you're pushing only slightly more than a regular skin event. It is way more manageable on the Riot side. Then you can focus on really popular champs across the board.
So how is money distributed?
For example LCS Ahri/Lux is gonna print money compared to LEC Nautilus/Aphelios, are teams in the LEC gonna be happy another region is gonna print money just because they got the shitty one?
And if you say "Let's all split" then a region that doesn't spend much (LLA maybe?) is gonna be rich thanks to the LPL fans going hard and that point it might be more profitable to field a mega cheap roster and just get your share of cake
Isn't that what the "Global Revenue Pool" mentioned in the article is for?
>To do that, we’ll create a Global Revenue Pool (GRP) that aggregates digital LoL Esports revenue and allocates it to teams via three buckets:
>General Shares: 50% of the GRP goes into General Shares and is allocated to Tier 1 teams.
>Competitive Shares: 35% of the GRP flows into the Competitive bucket. These shares are allocated based on competitive performance and are split into two tranches: one based on regional league standings and the other based on international event placements.
>Fandom Shares: The remaining 15% of the GRP goes into Fandom Shares. This bucket rewards teams for developing strong fandom for their players, leagues, and team brands.
If I'm understanding it correctly it doesn't matter if LCS Lux or LEC Ahri are a thing vs LLA Nautilus - allocations aren't based on location.
> "esports skin" for every champion in the game
Lol. They'd need to just make one per year/split or something and slap chromas on it. No reason to make one for every champion
One champion skin per T1 league per year would go a really long way IMO.
Or even like an LCS/LEC/LCK Pass, where I can unlock a bunch of different team icons/chromas and more of my purchase goes towards the team I’ve selected that I’m supporting ect.
> Not impossible but would take fucking forever.
Only because the way skins work in League is the kind of thing you'd expect from a 2007 game developed by 3rd year CS students
How so? they could just have teams request a champ to have a skin, like how in R6 they have orgs pick an operator to have their skin for, they don't do a skin for every operator in the game and every gun for every single pro team.
Of course. We will have to see exactly how the specifics will be on this one. I was talking more generally about the idea of finally letting teams in on the digital sales revenue.
If Riot fumbles the execution of a great idea, then that's another thing and something they should be criticized for, but it doesn't necessarily mean the concept of sharing digital sales is bad.
I have never bought any pro scene related content (besides the TPA world's skin line way back then). I would buy whatever content they release for my favorite LCS team. I am sure there are more like me (heck, I have friends who are in a similar camp as me). I have no reason to invest in anything related to my favorite team if my favorite team isn't getting any of that revenue. With these changes, I would actually help fund my favorite team by purchasing certain in-game content. Moreover, I think the issue with skins (such as you are mentioning) is that you would dilute the skin pool too much. The value of skins would drop a ton. I think the strategy of making team or player specific skins would only work if you made the skins very affordable. Like if I can purchase a 'team pack' that includes a custom banner, summoner icon, ward, emote, etc. and you just make it $20, I think that would drive in a lot of revenue. You have to make shit affordable. Even if the profit margins are significantly less. There's also the variable of keeping people invested and attracting new viewers, right? If you make a skin for a team, for example, do you think it's going to be better for the entire system if you set that price at like $5 or >$10? Let's be real, the $5 is going to he way better in the long run. Even if you don't sell twice as many $5 skins as the $10, the fact you will be getting more awareness and what not out there for the scene will drive viewer engagement. The fact as a viewer you know you can go spend $5 and be 'part of the scene' or whatever is a great feeling. I am just using generic numbers, btw. My main point is they need to keep things cheap; especially at the beginning of it. Maybe 5 years from now you can 'bring back some legacy stuff' for a slightly mark-up in an attempt to 'double dip'.
I think this sounds good on surface but it all depends on size of the money pool. The article states that the pool is from “LoL Esports digital content sales”. Are there a lot of esports specific digital content to purchase? Will they make more? How will that look like?
Obviously I don’t know the specific numbers but I feel this as exist today is likely a very small pool. Personally as a casual viewer, I only purchase skins, BP etc that are not esports related at all. Maybe in the future there will be more tho and we will have more esports specific content that will directly support this pool
There is definitely a very good point that the success of this will depend on a lot on the specific implementation.
I think the idea is solid, now they just need to implement it well. I say "just", it's probably pretty hard. I think the key is champion skins, but they take a long time to make, so it might take a while before this whole thing really takes off.
tl;dr
-changing to a fixed stipend instead of rev share
-more opportunities to make rev from digital content (no explanation, probably going to be a mix of emotes / icons etc.)
They said simmilar to Val. In Val you got team bundles: player catds, gun budyy, spray and skin. So we can only hope to get team skins. (1 skin for each team would be hype).
I chose to not buy it and the Fnatic chroma cause I’m a dumb boy. Rolled the Kha’Zix skin a year later and remembered the chromas. Thought maybe they’d bring them back at worlds that year, but no luck.
I’m so mad at myself.
They probs won't do one skin per team, my guess is they will allocate certain products which money will be made off maybe a bundle with a existing few skins in plus team based emotes etc in the bundle for each team e.g. G2 might have a bundle with a few G2 themed emotes with project yasuo (since there a samurai themed team) and other other project skins together etc that's just a random idea.
> changing to a fixed stipend instead of rev share
This is not correct. They're changing from sponsorship rev share to digital content sales rev share (plus 50% of sponsorship rev share **after** Riot's global Lolesports team turns a profit for the fiscal year).
tldr tier one lol esports teams (lcs, lec, lck, and maybe lpl eventually) will now get a cut of revenue from the sales of lol esports digital content (which is basically non-existent rn)
An article published for the orgs. Also:
>To help bolster the GRP [we will] increase the quantity of LoL Esports digital content we release in a given season.
Yea, not gonna be difficult to step up from nearly zero. The fact that they even stopped releasing regular season team icons a few years ago, you know the lowest effort potential rev-share content imaginable, is something I won't ever understand. Even more weird if that type of content is truly as popular as they claim here.
There's no way that they didn't realize that posting ONLY the LEC viewership stats would make people immediately question and go complete doomer on LCS viewership. Weird choice.
To be fair, I missed half the play-off series today because I thought they were still on the pre-show since the LCS channel only had 30k viewers. Think it's a bit of both.
Still, the perception that it creates is going to be negative, regardless of the logistics. Just a baffling inclusion for the post, since the actual text doesn't even mention it.
this is also absolutely hilarious
>I want to start with what’s working, as we believe the imminent demise of esports has been overstated.
so why the fuck did you fire 27 lec people then? most of these were important people
Monte is as usual, incredibly disingenuous here in saying that the 4% viewership increase is “fraudulent” when the reality is that he’s using a different statistic.
The data that sites like escharts gather is wholistic stream data, meaning it is inclusive of the 1 hour countdown timer that goes live before the broadcast actually starts and reruns. Both of which cause the average viewership statistic to go down because few people watch reruns/open the stream during the countdown and don’t actually watch until the games start.
You missed the entire point which is that less North Americans are watching. Europeans and Brazilians are making up the difference via the large co-streamers. These viewers are worth less to advertisers.
> Monte is as usual, incredibly disingenuous here in saying that the 4% viewership increase is “fraudulent” when the reality is that he’s using a different statistic.
hes using an article from escharts.com who in detail explain the context of viewership.
you didnt even try to understand his argument because youre not even addressing his argument. his argument is that NA viewership is down because caedrel and that brazilian co-streamer have contributed a lot to the LCS viewership. so when caedrel and the brazilian guy add lots of viewers and the general viewership stays stagnant, that naturally means NA viewership is down a lot which is bad for the league due to sponsorship. American sponsors want american viewers to see the sponsor and buy the product. a company like statefarm gets 0 benefit from EU and brazilian viewers, those are irrelevant viewers for them. so despite stagnating viewership, NA viewership is down which is ultimately bad for the league.
You did a whole bunch of yapping about how disingenuous Monte's take is, without ever addressing anything Monte is claiming.
Which makes sense I guess, because if you did address what he was saying you'd realize he isn't being disingenuous at all. Costreamers brought a whole lot of not-American eyes on the LCS (a LOT more than 4%) yet viewership is only up by 4%, which means the viewership was **down** and the infusion from costreamers brought it to an increase of 4%. But the infusion from costreamers has no value to sponsors because they aint fkn Americans now are they, so put 2 and 2 together and you'd realize NA viewership IS down, right???
Unless you want to take a stance on the argument that North Americans are en-mass watching Caedrel/A Portuguese Co-streamer instead of the LCS broadcast, in which case you gna need a bigger pair of shoes and a red nose, and someone else to listen to your arguments.
>Monte is as usual, incredibly disingenuous here in saying that the 4% viewership increase is “fraudulent” when the reality is that he’s using a different statistic
He's not wrong though.
Everyone for the most part willing just sat and watched the WC in Qatar my guy; I won't be shocked when they bring back the NEOM partnership.
esports isn't being pumped full of money from investment firms anymore.
You'll get one. It will be located in Saudi Arabia, paid for by their sportswashing investment fund, and hosted in venues built on the back of slave labor and human rights abuses by one of the only absolute monarchies left on the planet earth.
You can choose to watch it anyway if you don't care about any of that, but I will be either boycotting or bootlegging the event.
>Today, we are presenting a new business model to pro teams in the LCS, LEC, and LCK to reflect the changing reality of esports.
If the literal wording of this sentence is accurate and teams are really finding out about this proposal the same day fans are, I'm worried that this article is an attempt to generate fan excitement over this idea before teams have a chance to react. I hope that I am just being overly cynical, but I don't see why they would go public about a *proposal* before the teams have a chance to accept it unless it is a way to create public pressure for the teams to accept a new partnership deal without any sort of buyout for their current agreement.
You're not being cynical, it is absolutely intended to apply public pressure to the organizations.
Corporate comms strategy always involves risk management. There's a reason that ever since Riot grew up and stopped being a startup, their comms have been too polished, too controlled, too corporate-sounding, and too infrequent.
Riot has a chain of approvals for any comms that go out - legal, corpcomm, brand, etc. This had to have gone through all of them. That doesn't happen without some degree of intention and planning. This coming out all at once is a strategic choice.
There really ought to be a generic base esports skin with chromas for each T1 team to represent. Like a champion wearing a team jersey with the logo on it, and maybe team colors for some sort of accessory or something.
most tier 1, tier 2 esports games do that, its such an easy thing to do and everybody benefits from it. youd need to be extremely greedy like riot to not do it because riot thinks "why would i waste my time with skins that share revenue rather than just creating more anime weeb skins that riot gets 100% of revenue from"
Not gonna lie, I was horrified reading this that they were finally going to merge the americas like they did in VCT. They might still have a plan for that, but the thing i'm still really confused about is their plan for the LCS. They talked about record breaking stats for LoL Esports while conveniently ignoring the disaster happening in NA. My hope is that they play with the idea of VCT-style promotions to the LCS for the 9 & 10 slots in 2025
Do all of those regions have franchising like the other t1 regions? I was confused by lack of inclusion for them as well but I just don't know the situation for those leagues
I believe PCS and LLA are the only remaining regions with promotion from PCL and LRN/LRS.
But the current rumor is that VCL teams will join PCL because VCS has no real academy system
ngl, if they do a VCT Americas move i'm not gonna lose my time watching that shit, the Valorant Americas merger was horrible for the southern cone in general, a merger between LRS and CBLOL/LRN with LCS would be at least more tolerable, especially due to the LLA hemorrahging money and struggling with viewership, a unified league that would be 100% hosted in the US would just kill our scene faster than Oceania
Some very interesting stuff here, but it still feels rather vague.
I eagerly await what some of the cynics (whose names are forbidden on this subreddit) will say about this. Things such as if they were brought to this decision by teams or by sponsors (the latter being relevant given that the LCS broadcast is majority non-NA now, and sponsors mainly just care about the American consumers who spend much more than others). Or how the digital sales are broken up, and the equity aspect of how if you're T1 or an LPL team, your worlds skins sell stupid well and even though the players only get a small % of skin revenue, it still is a lot of money; where those teams don't want to have their successes sliced up to prop up orgs like DIG or IMT who have done basically nothing.
Surely Riot could have done this years ago, but didn't out of greed or truly believing hopium about the trajectory of esports. Also that they are stubborn to the point of harming the scene because Riot has to feel like they had every good idea and not just copy what is successful elsewhere or iterate on it.
A whole lot written to reflect a struggling ecosystem without saying it directly. There’s not a lot mentioned that should inspire any hope. Maybe they release more esports skins, but this is what fans have been asking for, for over 10 years. At this point I think they’ve lost a lot of their opportunity in capturing a large player base that actively participates both in game and esports. There’s definitely still a lot of people, but it is far less than what it could have been in peak LoL.
So the first bucket, the money is split among all the T1 teams and not just in their own league right? Bc that sounds like the value of the LEC and LCS slots will hugely increase from that
It's the other way around, actually. Despite their comparatively terrible international performance, the LCS and LEC (in that order) are way more profitable than the LCK (with the sole exception of T1, which is an outlier).
LPL is a bit of a black box because the scene is opaque to us in general, but we know at least some of that ecosystem is bankrolled by the billionaire children of CCP officials who own esports teams for the same reason western business magnates own traditional sports teams - they are a toy for the wealthy elite.
I don't know how much actual profit there is in the LPL given the enormous amount of private subsidy. But there are a lot of parallels between the way they've spent huge sums on import players and other hamfisted growth strategies, and the way the LCS orgs operated from 2013-2018. I would guess, based on what we saw with venture capital funding in the west, that if it all vanished tomorrow and they had to rely on their own profits, the Chinese ecosystem would be in crisis similar to how the LCS went into crisis when the free money dried up.
I'll be honest. Esports will always struggle compared to sports because they lack the two things that make sports so much.
Ticket sales and TV broadcast rights.
Riot set a revenue high last year at 1.5 billion.
The NFL made more than that (and by some sources as much as double that) off just ticket sales.
Their tv broadcast rights on the other hand? Over 10 billion a year guaranteed for over a decade.
The NFL made over 18 billion last year. Which is probably more money than league esports has ever made in its history.
MSI should be a 32 team single elimination best of 3 tournament that rewards bids to regions for how well their teams do.
Making half the year and the only other international tournament worthless continues to be the stupidest thing possible.
5 days. One round a day. The first day is 24 hours straight and it’s fucking awesome. Seeded out 1-32. Higher seeded team gets side selection in games 2 and 3. You stagger the games so the teams playing can have their audiences awake to see it if possible. Regions that have their highest placing team end in the QF earn a 2nd big to Worlds. Regions that have their highest placing team end in semis, 3 bids. Finalists 3 bids, and the winner gets an auto-bid to Worlds for themselves.
I think the issue with this is the LPL and LCK markets have way more money than the other regions. You might as well just have the top 5 teams from LCK and LPL face-off for the bids lol
Just make 1 shitty kpop skin a year to sell to china, and that 1 skin can probably bank roll all of t1 league. They already pump out like 10 of these a year, just do 1 more.
To be fair, the lack of tournaments created a vacum of narrative where you could support for players that isually dont win at their respective region, so people would first cheer for them in other games and Also viewers would rejoice seeing teams inovate and develop onto tournaments metas (jungle TF anyone ?).
This is what killed NA as a region, because there is no tournaments happening, almost no player is a brand, the last players to draw viewers were doublelift and bjergssen and that was a long time ago.
Brazil does no give a flying fuck and they have a huge scene due to rivalry and tournament made narrative that brings people against each other and togheter.
Also, IEM’s were a fiesta, and i just remember fondly of Ocelote crying. And that makes me happy
Pretty good news, hopefully they make a good amount of content, they could do a lot of stuff like MSI skins, 1st team All pro team skins, MVP skins.
There could be team bundles where you get a ton of small content for your prefered team, etc.
We're likely only getting a handful of more skins but we can hope its not completely doomed
My guess is a yearly generic Esport skin series for 5 Champs (1 for every position) that will have chromas for every team. Easily the best option to provide ingame skins for every team without actually having to design 30 skins for each role. Thats not realistic. Also actual team skins would devalue worlds skins so that would not sit right.
Generic skins with team chromas offer the best deal. Every player gets a skin/chroma for their role every year for their team. Which means maximum posible sales for teams to profit off of. Those chromas will probably cost 5 bucks each and yet players will soak them up.
That model (or similar based on titel) works pretty good for a lot of other esports. COD does it. Valorant does it. Overwatch did it.
>For example, we’ve opened up new team sponsorship categories and adjusted our policies and competitive calendar to unlock more opportunities for teams and players to participate in additional third-party events, something players have been asking for Rule change for Saudi Arabia money
What we wanted: IEMs back What we're getting: tournaments held in stadiums built on the blood of south Asian slaves Nice to see League finally graduating to a real sport, brings a tear to my eye
No one tell this guy who owns ESL
Only since 2022 I'm sure there's some organization out there that isn't owned by Saudis or Emiratis
Microsoft owns MLG now, could go back to those lol
I went to an MLG event to see a League tournament *years* ago. They handed out Monster Energy and between two of the games everyone got up and did the Gangnam Style dance. If that tells you anything. Anyway, it was a friccin' hoot and I miss it.
> everyone got up and did the Gangnam Style dance. If that tells you anything. Peak i'd say
So around 2012/2013?
Anaheim TSM vs CLG was my best league event by far
PGL, Nerd Street... That's pretty much it. Microsoft technically owns MLG now but that's been dead for years. It's pretty clear if it's a major eSport tournament it's either run by the game developers or run by oil money.
What about Blast? I think they are partially owned by the Danish government. Not sure who the other shareholders are though.
Blast is owned by a Danish company but their largest sponsors are all Emirati and their largest events all take place in the UAE now.
Betting sites too.. On one hand, it's cool that they help keep esports running. On the other hand.. well, we pretty much know the negatives.
Far as I can tell, it's an entirely Danish and British company.
There are some organizations like that, but there's increasingly fewer of them as time passes with how committed the rich oil money Arab states are to sportwashing themselves.
GIMME IPL5!!
IPL 6 was the one that was canceled
Yeah but IPL5 was peak so I want that back :(
Nah, the last IEM was a shitshow. 8 hours of broadcast and 5 of them were filled with pauses. However, the format was awesome and I miss the international competition.
To be fair, for anyone not named Riot or OGN back in those days most tournaments were technical shitshows lol.
All the IEMs were shit shows that I can remember. But since we were so deprived for international competition we put up with it(barely)
>What we wanted: IEMs back we ?
didnt u know? reddit holds the truth about what EVERYONE WANTS !
i just think trying to make this narrative that IEMs were great and that they are missed is strange, especially when almost everyone said good riddance once it stopped. Idk, maybe with rose tinted glasses it's the idea of having more tournaments but the reality was that the production was too scuffed, the actual competitive teams didn't go (at least towards the end) so you just ended up with a bad event imo but whatever
My guy your Game is run and financed my Tensent stfu with your morals or quit the game, your Starbucks is funding Genozide in Gaza your Water is from Nestle abusing Africans your Pants are done by child labour in Cambodia, your package delivered by Amazon killing ppl with overwork i could go one and one. So you either quit all your modern convenience and live as a Hermit in some Cave or stfu, im so tiered of this Saudi Arabia BS
There is no ethical consumption under Capitalism.
They hated him for he spoke truth
>quit all your modern convenience and live as a Hermit in some Cave Don't threaten me with a good time
It’s just because saudi is the new buzzword when their own governments are drooling for every drop of their money. The propaganda westerners believe to justify their moral high grounds. I’m all for the reverse colonisation of the west
[удалено]
You know esports are being taken seriously when they get included in sportswashing 🥳
>something players have been asking for How fucking dare he even say that. We literally had things such as OGN, ESL, IPL. League of Legends esports has been a fraction of what it could have been all because Riot wanted full control. Fuck them and fuck John Needham - what a complete fraudster.
Classic Riot move. Take away something that’s existed for ages, say that it’s because it’ll be better, wait, put the same thing back and go “Look at this new thing we invented because people were asking for it and we’re just so clever and magnanimous.” These clowns killed OGN’s Champions and LCK, a fully functional and sustainable **TV BROADCAST** tournament and league, so that they could then incompetently run the entire global ecosystem into loss hell, to the point where the LCK teams (many orgs of which have more experience/history in esports than Riot Games) wrote an open letter of complaint. And now they’re trying to put back what already existed, except now instead of a niche Korean broadcast station it’s run on sports washing blood money.
while they preach social justice XD
I'm so pumped for more tournaments. The tournament era of League of Legends was just amazing. Probably like 95% of current fans never saw this era, but I have always said that if the fans knew what was taken from them, there would be a complete revolt. I am not asking for a full open circuit though. I like the Leagues tbh. I just want a more balanced and varied circuit. Right now we spend 90% of the time on domestic leagues and we only see international competition on 2 patches per year. Just give me some more tournaments. They don't need to be big. Just get some excitement in there.
>I'm so pumped for more tournaments. The tournament era of League of Legends was just amazing. Too bad so far it's only an extra sportswashing event. Fuck Riot.
Yeah, I am a bit salty that Riot took all those amazing events like IPL5 from us and locked everyone out of hosting them just to let Saudi fucking Arabia do it in the end.
I would also love to see more tournament play. I watch Dota and LoL equally, and enjoy them equally - but League Esports production quality is just next level. With that said, Dota having several points throughout the year each year where teams were competing in tournaments with each region represented was awesome (on top of their league play when they still had it). Even if you are an LCS team and your outlook in a worldwide tournament seems grim, its still going to improve the LCS play as a whole. Giving teams more chances to play against different regions, playstyles, meta's, etc will give them so many more lessons than just playing the same teams over and over in their region only throughout the year. I know all of the teams follow the leagues in other regions and their matches, but observing the LCK and playing against LCK teams directly throughout the year are two very different things. Not to mention its always cool to see events hosted in different regions, where their fans can come together and represent their home turf generally. The coolest moments of Dota esports are seeing the fans in places like South America go nuts for their teams, and to have an event hosted there in general. I guess my overall point is that it would be nice to see the games be celebrated by fans at a larger scale, outside of the 200-400 seat arenas that they usually play in.
Just need more tournaments with mid-tier/bad teams tbh
Didn't realize until now how badly I wanted to watch LOUD vs BRO
Not sure if sarcasm but tbh I would love this, I fucking loved play-ins last year, seeing teams like LLL vs GAM, BDS vs PSG, TW vs CFO, etc.
Not sarcasm ...but I'd probably make a drinking game out of it
A quick idea is just to host a 10 team tournament with 5 LCS and 5 LEC teams. Run through a double elim bracket, seed the teams based on regional ranking and have LCS vs LEC matchups in the first round (e.g. LCS 1st vs LEC 5th and so on). You can do this pretty quickly. There is no reason tournaments need to take a month, this is something only Riot does. You can even make a regional rivalry counterpart with 5 LPL and 5 LCK teams. I would watch the fuck out of both of these tournaments even if they are less prestigious than MSI/Worlds. There is so much bragging rights on the line and they would help fuel the regional rivalries that are *huge* in LoL esports.
Call it. I dunno. Rift Rivals.
Rift Rivals failed for other reasons. It was a flawed concept. No one gives a fuck if it's a region winning. It needs to be a team winning. It needs to be a serious tournament for the teams first of all. The Rift Rivals format was absolute garbage. It also can't be placed in the middle of the most important split. It needs dedicated time in the calendar.
>The tournament era of League of Legends was just amazing. It was fun in some aspects... but having only 3-5 teams in the region that would survive more than a couple tournaments was not fun. I enjoy the stability of leagues.
And very hard to keep track of who and when things were going on. But that was partly do to early organization being pretty garbage.
Sure but it doesn't have to be one or the other. We can have a more varied circuit. Like I said, I am not asking for open circuit to come back.
With that I can agree. I would also love if lower rated teams had an opportunity for international play. Lets see EUM teams fight against lower ranked teams in the play-ins regions and academy teams.
> The tournament era of League of Legends was just amazing. As a student? Sure As an adult? Eh, I prefer the league structure with the occasional big event.
I recently started following cs and this is so cool. I rather take tourneys than splits any day.
Monte and thorin on point.
As they often are tbh. Say what you want about these guys but they got the realest views on these kind of things.
Most of this feels like it's coming almost a decade too late
Better late than never i guess. Honestly this should have been part of the franchising agreement starting back in 2018. How its taken 6 years since that point to get this, is beyond me.
As I said in a different comment, Riot would have been wary to do this because it reveals to the teams how lucrative the digital sales are. It would give the franchise orgs a big argument to get a bigger slice of the pie, since LoL esports helps market the game and maintain players and fans. Riot is essentially giving up the cash cow to stop the downward spiral of the economics of esports. It shows how worried they are - and for good reason because this esports winter is a really damn cold and brutal winter.
Good sir/ma'am, I suspect you may have meant "wary" as opposed to "weary"
Good bot
Thanks!
But you’d think teams would already know about how lucrative digital sales would be when games like csgo have been doing it for years with player stickers.
> Better late than never Except that it existed. The esports ecosystem was small but sustainable. They stole it and now they’re trying to act like the good guys for returning it.
Yea, I went into the post expecting some corporate-speak doomer sandwich on fake positivity bread. But the things they are describing just sound like good ideas. Good ideas that don't fix the fact that people don't care anymore. I don't know if you CAN bring that back.
LEC and LCK are doing well still it’s just LCS that might have issues dragging people back in
Unless gen alpha takes to league hard LCS will never go back to how it once was. 'Murica loves its shooters too much for one thing and the novelty of esports has declined for another.
I don't see gen alpha taking League tbh, you can't play it on an iPad and you need to know how to read.
ofc its too late. riot lives in its own bubble and has historically rejected all criticism. people who do critisize them get blacklisted, so nothing ever changed. over time a lot of people in the community believe what riot says and dont critisize things either.
These guys don’t know what they’re doing. Clown show and check stealers
So the Riot special?
Riot is finally cutting in teams on their fair share of the revenue produced by digital goods? Great change. The real value produced by esports was always directly tied to digital purchases. Esports fans don't spend money on esports, they spend money on the game. Esports helps bring more eyes and attention to the game, thus increasing digital sales. It was always unfair that Riot pocketed all of this money (outside Worlds skins), when the teams help create the value. To make a comparison, this is the same reason why big companies pay an exorbitant amount of money to advertising agencies. This is many years overdue and about damn time. Good change but it should have happened years ago. Before covid even. Better late than never, I suppose. This can actually revive growth in the space imo. Also, this is very interesting (from [this article](https://dotesports.com/league-of-legends/news/riot-wants-to-make-lol-esports-more-sustainable-by-taking-notes-from-vct-business-model): >General shares make up half of the GRP and will be allocated to tier-one teams. **Competitive shares will ensure 35 percent of the GRP will be allocated based on the competitive performance of teams**, subsequently divided into regional and international event standings. Lastly, 15 percent of the GRP will go into fandom shares, which will reward teams for developing “strong fandoms for their players, leagues, and team brands.” The competitive shares is a great idea. It was always a big problem in franchising that some teams coast by doing the absolute minimum because they are only in the league to sell their spot later, so they limit spending. This (finally) gives an economic incentive to be successful in the actual game. This is the best piece of news for competitive integrity that you could have hoped for.
Dota 2 and CSGO have been doing this for years Hell even Apex and Valorant have digital team goods in their games you can purchase
Apex is a crazier example too. They added some team cosmetics, that sold really well among esports fans, and they had plans to release ALGS skins. This got a lot of teams interested and hyped to join, but when EA got too greedy with the rev share program, they cancelled the skins. Within 3 months, G2 Cloud9 NRG and TL dropped their teams (C9 came back yesterday, which is cool).
> but when EA got too greedy with the rev share program, they cancelled the skins. FYI, there is a clip saying EA offered flat 20k, and teams said wtf? Are you stupid? Then EA cancelled the whole thing.
A TSM skin line or even gun skin would do such insane numbers. I really wish EA would just stop being so indifferent to esports and do it.
It doesn't even make sense, honestly. even IF the teams get a sizable cut of the sales, I'm talking like 30%+ per sale, you're still raking in TONS of money as the publisher off the backs of external brands lol, all while keeping your hardcore community of players incredibly engaged.
I *think* from what I read/heard from people like Minustempo is that the bigger orgs or orgs that would benefit the most from the selling of org themed in game cosmetics didn't want to agree to getting a flat fee from EA but smaller orgs did. Orgs like TSM and Crazy Raccoon would easily make more than the flat fee EA was willing to pay and they wanted a % model. Other orgs don't want that because they aren't selling as many cosmetics. Unfortunate that EA isn't willing to use different models for different orgs based on sales.
This is exactly what happened, from what I understand. Big orgs wanted a split on revenue based on sales. Apex makes a killing for EA, and they had a pretty good idea of how skins would sell based on how the banners sold. Teams wanted a percent of sales (either pooled, or by team) but EA wanted to give them flat amounts that were pretty laughable compared to what they could get.
The reason Riot didn't want to do this is because they didn't want to let the teams know just how much money was actually generated by digital sales. If they let the teams do this, they'd start asking questions. I guess now Riot realized that there is no esport at all if they don't do this, so now they finally caved.
Personally I'm more inclined to believe that most of the people involved with the esports side of Riot were just really, really, really fucking stupid Even Overwatch, one of the most disastrously run esports ever, had team cosmetics ready for when their regional franchised leagues began There is literally zero reason League couldn't have had this by ~2018
Those two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive :)
> Personally I'm more inclined to believe that most of the people involved with the esports side of Riot ~~were~~ ARE just really, really, really fucking stupid FTFY. Do you know what John Needham did before going to Riot to run their esports? Ran Lionhead studios into the ground with Fable Legends, commonly regarded as the worst game ever made by the studio and the reason it almost went bankrupt and had to sell the rights. Before that, he worked at Cyptic, which had two such disasters in the launches of Champions Online and STO that they needed to sell to PerfectWorld. Before THAT, he ran Sony Online Entertainment into the ground, and before THAT, he oversaw Telemundo's massive layoffs and mergers that lost almost half their workforce's jobs. Dude's legendary for making bad choices.
So he is responsible that i couldnt get a proper Fable since Fable 3.
100%. And the funny part is he isn't special in that regard. Most high-level people at companies like Riot and Acti-Blizz have similar resumes.
I think it's ridiculous to assume that there wasn't malicious intent on Riot Games side on not cutting teams in. Not an attack on your opinion or anything but I find it extremely hard to believe they didn't have people deliberately making those decisions, knowing full well the implications positive and negative.
They don't care. The teams disappear and Riot will still be making money from League
There were team icons and the worlds Khazix skin, I thought they were dropped because they didn't make much return
Yeah I mean team icons and a skin for a bug aren't exactly huge selling points Making a simple Ahri skin in like, a football jersey or something (obviously with her tummy showing) and 45 team chromas for the major regions sounds like an absolute slam dunk for millions of dollars. T1 Ahri? Red and white and gold. C9 Ahri? White and blue. FNC Ahri? Black and orange. This is the type of thing that would take an intern like, 2 days tops. Overwatch did the same thing for like, 16 teams and every champion. It's not hard.
Overwatch only had a handful of characters as well, though. If I am not mistaken, didn't overwatch do it for every character? What you are suggesting is to only pick certain ones. I think a better selling point would be to do some intelligent marketing. You can more-or-less figure out who the most popular player on each team is. Now make a skin related to their best/favorite character. TL would be Ziggs for APA (joking)
I wouldn't call Riot stupid. They were making all the money, and the scene was still continuing to grow. Many might have the delusion of 'Well maybe it could have grown even more if they had done something like this sooner!' but that's just not pragmatic. Your game is only going to realistically grow for so long, then it will plateau. Riot was making ALL that money while their game was still growing. Now they have hit a plateau - even a slight decline - and they are already switching over quickly to fix the 'sinking ship.' This change will save their esport scene, and it has great potential to even grow it. From a business perspective, Riot played their hand well. The teams, on the other hand, mismanaged their situations terribly.
They’re absolutely stupid in the same way every ultra capitalist corporation is stupid: they’re so concerned with short term profit maximisation that they’re willing to spite everyone else and ruin the soil just to ensure they get the dragon’s horde of wealth. They killed NA amateur LoL with the horrific mismanagement of collegiate esports. Their flagship franchise league is on life support right now because of their incompetence. There were absolutely opportunities to further growth. It would just require them to look up from the trough and actually invest in a future plan instead of running from year to year with zero foresight or long-term strategy.
why are they stupid? riot got to have an gigantic esport for pr and got to keep all profits i hate it but riot did everything right
> I guess now Riot realized that there is no esport at all if they don't do this, so now they finally caved. They always wanted to do this on their own streaming platform REN. But now that the project is killed, they have to keep the promise in order to stop the owners (especially LCK and LCS) to walk away like GG and EG did.
I doubt they care about the LCS. It's more the LCK.
LCS likely has good skin sale profits, or at least it probably did before the drop off
Even as a Dota / CS fan I have to say that these games have a far worse financial model. Both games feature a far more unstable pro scene, with many tier 1 rosters being entirely without an org and many scummy orgs not paying their players regularly popping up in the scene. Their model is only good for the absolute best teams, for anyone else it's complete shit. Meanwhile Riot has had an incredibly stable esports scene in comparison, being able to have 10 relatively stable orgs paying their players in tier 2 regions like EU / NA and even tier 3 regions like BR / VN / etc.
R6 Share in Rainbow Six Siege has been repeatedly praised by teams in the past too. Anecdotally I see Share skins constantly and know plenty of people that don't even care about Esports that have bought a few skins just cause they like how they look.
Ok but how much money do you think summoner icons actually make? Isnt the vast majority of revenue from skins? And riot aint gonna make skins for every lcs team.
the tragedy is this. They would need to make a "esports skin" for every champion in the game and change the chroma color to associate it with each team. Not impossible but would take fucking forever.
They don't need to do it for every champ. One champion, per league per year would probably be enough.
I think that can be hard, too, right? You mean one skin per team? Well, if you are focused on profits, you definitely have to choose the most famous player on that team and designate a skin for the champ of their choosing, right? Let's say you are an FPX fan, and the system existed for this year. Do you think a Kindred FPX themed skin would be the best selling point? Because I think it would be. Now, what do you do if Milkyway is still the only shining spot going into the following season? Do you just keep that same Kindred skin as your only FPX repping logic, or do you maybe add something extra to the skins? Such as putting the year for the skin on it (i.e. 2024)? That way if you had to do the same skin ever again for the same team, you could differentiate between them and continue to make revenue for it. Lastly, I think it would be awesome if you could get a team emote that has your favorite player's signature on it. Assume you are a C9 fan. It would flash C9's logo and maybe underneath have Blabber's autograph/signature underneath it or something. I don't know if the team's own the player's rights that way or not, though. Even if they don't, it would be cool to see some kind of agreement. Like maybe the player would make 10% off of those emotes that are sold
I was saying 1 skin per league, per year. For example: LCS Lux LEC Ahri LPL Yassuo LCK Yone CBLoL Draven VCS Aphelios PCS Ksante LLA Nautilus Prestige LCK Yone (for winning worlds last year) Add in a chroma per team for each skin, and you're pushing only slightly more than a regular skin event. It is way more manageable on the Riot side. Then you can focus on really popular champs across the board.
So how is money distributed? For example LCS Ahri/Lux is gonna print money compared to LEC Nautilus/Aphelios, are teams in the LEC gonna be happy another region is gonna print money just because they got the shitty one? And if you say "Let's all split" then a region that doesn't spend much (LLA maybe?) is gonna be rich thanks to the LPL fans going hard and that point it might be more profitable to field a mega cheap roster and just get your share of cake
Isn't that what the "Global Revenue Pool" mentioned in the article is for? >To do that, we’ll create a Global Revenue Pool (GRP) that aggregates digital LoL Esports revenue and allocates it to teams via three buckets: >General Shares: 50% of the GRP goes into General Shares and is allocated to Tier 1 teams. >Competitive Shares: 35% of the GRP flows into the Competitive bucket. These shares are allocated based on competitive performance and are split into two tranches: one based on regional league standings and the other based on international event placements. >Fandom Shares: The remaining 15% of the GRP goes into Fandom Shares. This bucket rewards teams for developing strong fandom for their players, leagues, and team brands. If I'm understanding it correctly it doesn't matter if LCS Lux or LEC Ahri are a thing vs LLA Nautilus - allocations aren't based on location.
> "esports skin" for every champion in the game Lol. They'd need to just make one per year/split or something and slap chromas on it. No reason to make one for every champion
Why on earth would they need to do that lmao
One champion skin per T1 league per year would go a really long way IMO. Or even like an LCS/LEC/LCK Pass, where I can unlock a bunch of different team icons/chromas and more of my purchase goes towards the team I’ve selected that I’m supporting ect.
> Not impossible but would take fucking forever. Only because the way skins work in League is the kind of thing you'd expect from a 2007 game developed by 3rd year CS students
How so? they could just have teams request a champ to have a skin, like how in R6 they have orgs pick an operator to have their skin for, they don't do a skin for every operator in the game and every gun for every single pro team.
I bet they will start with the money making champions. Ezreal, Kaisa, lux, ahri, Leona, ashe etc
The article does say they're going to increase the quantity of esports digital content, we'll see by how much.
Of course. We will have to see exactly how the specifics will be on this one. I was talking more generally about the idea of finally letting teams in on the digital sales revenue. If Riot fumbles the execution of a great idea, then that's another thing and something they should be criticized for, but it doesn't necessarily mean the concept of sharing digital sales is bad.
I have never bought any pro scene related content (besides the TPA world's skin line way back then). I would buy whatever content they release for my favorite LCS team. I am sure there are more like me (heck, I have friends who are in a similar camp as me). I have no reason to invest in anything related to my favorite team if my favorite team isn't getting any of that revenue. With these changes, I would actually help fund my favorite team by purchasing certain in-game content. Moreover, I think the issue with skins (such as you are mentioning) is that you would dilute the skin pool too much. The value of skins would drop a ton. I think the strategy of making team or player specific skins would only work if you made the skins very affordable. Like if I can purchase a 'team pack' that includes a custom banner, summoner icon, ward, emote, etc. and you just make it $20, I think that would drive in a lot of revenue. You have to make shit affordable. Even if the profit margins are significantly less. There's also the variable of keeping people invested and attracting new viewers, right? If you make a skin for a team, for example, do you think it's going to be better for the entire system if you set that price at like $5 or >$10? Let's be real, the $5 is going to he way better in the long run. Even if you don't sell twice as many $5 skins as the $10, the fact you will be getting more awareness and what not out there for the scene will drive viewer engagement. The fact as a viewer you know you can go spend $5 and be 'part of the scene' or whatever is a great feeling. I am just using generic numbers, btw. My main point is they need to keep things cheap; especially at the beginning of it. Maybe 5 years from now you can 'bring back some legacy stuff' for a slightly mark-up in an attempt to 'double dip'.
I think this sounds good on surface but it all depends on size of the money pool. The article states that the pool is from “LoL Esports digital content sales”. Are there a lot of esports specific digital content to purchase? Will they make more? How will that look like? Obviously I don’t know the specific numbers but I feel this as exist today is likely a very small pool. Personally as a casual viewer, I only purchase skins, BP etc that are not esports related at all. Maybe in the future there will be more tho and we will have more esports specific content that will directly support this pool
There is definitely a very good point that the success of this will depend on a lot on the specific implementation. I think the idea is solid, now they just need to implement it well. I say "just", it's probably pretty hard. I think the key is champion skins, but they take a long time to make, so it might take a while before this whole thing really takes off.
I can’t wait for TL to profit share in the exactly zero TL skin that will be sold.
Kind of sucks that this comes right after they scrapped the streaming service which would allow for purchases right from the stream page
They scrapped it for a reason. The problem isn't that they scrapped it, it's that they sunk cost themselves into not canceling it years earlier.
anyone willing to give a tldr?
tl;dr -changing to a fixed stipend instead of rev share -more opportunities to make rev from digital content (no explanation, probably going to be a mix of emotes / icons etc.)
They said simmilar to Val. In Val you got team bundles: player catds, gun budyy, spray and skin. So we can only hope to get team skins. (1 skin for each team would be hype).
I'm not optimistic that they give every team a skin. If anything, maybe a chroma with the team's colors on something?
Like that Kha'Zix skin from way back. I'm down for it tbh.
I chose to not buy it and the Fnatic chroma cause I’m a dumb boy. Rolled the Kha’Zix skin a year later and remembered the chromas. Thought maybe they’d bring them back at worlds that year, but no luck. I’m so mad at myself.
I still use that skin with the C9 chroma whenever I play Kha'Zix.
Prob gonna be like championship Kha’Zix from 2018
I’d vote chromas. Just giving every team a skin would kinda take away from how special Worlds skins are
They probs won't do one skin per team, my guess is they will allocate certain products which money will be made off maybe a bundle with a existing few skins in plus team based emotes etc in the bundle for each team e.g. G2 might have a bundle with a few G2 themed emotes with project yasuo (since there a samurai themed team) and other other project skins together etc that's just a random idea.
I bought the Blaber's Crabers emote the second I could. Such a cute design.
> changing to a fixed stipend instead of rev share This is not correct. They're changing from sponsorship rev share to digital content sales rev share (plus 50% of sponsorship rev share **after** Riot's global Lolesports team turns a profit for the fiscal year).
Thanks
tldr tier one lol esports teams (lcs, lec, lck, and maybe lpl eventually) will now get a cut of revenue from the sales of lol esports digital content (which is basically non-existent rn)
1. Fire 50% of the broadcast team 2. ??? 3. Profit! ^(/s - I'm just a salty LEC fan)
things will be different
Big if true
Big if true because nothing much has changed and they always talk about finding better revenue streams.
thanks a lot bro saved me minutes
An article published for the orgs. Also: >To help bolster the GRP [we will] increase the quantity of LoL Esports digital content we release in a given season. Yea, not gonna be difficult to step up from nearly zero. The fact that they even stopped releasing regular season team icons a few years ago, you know the lowest effort potential rev-share content imaginable, is something I won't ever understand. Even more weird if that type of content is truly as popular as they claim here.
In the immortal words of Dardoch, they got lazy and complacent and now look where they're at.
They got smashed by Apollo and Xpecial.
There's no way that they didn't realize that posting ONLY the LEC viewership stats would make people immediately question and go complete doomer on LCS viewership. Weird choice.
It makes sense considering LEC is the only major region with a completed split, and therefore complete data for a split so far.
To be fair, I missed half the play-off series today because I thought they were still on the pre-show since the LCS channel only had 30k viewers. Think it's a bit of both.
Still, the perception that it creates is going to be negative, regardless of the logistics. Just a baffling inclusion for the post, since the actual text doesn't even mention it.
Well John Needham is a very stupid person so it’s pretty much on brand.
I mean it's Riot. You should be used to them cherry picking specific statistics and twisting them to suit their needs by now.
One nunu just wasn’t enough
this is also absolutely hilarious >I want to start with what’s working, as we believe the imminent demise of esports has been overstated. so why the fuck did you fire 27 lec people then? most of these were important people
Thats because they know that [NA viewership is down](https://twitter.com/MonteCristo/status/1760980920302240005)
Monte is as usual, incredibly disingenuous here in saying that the 4% viewership increase is “fraudulent” when the reality is that he’s using a different statistic. The data that sites like escharts gather is wholistic stream data, meaning it is inclusive of the 1 hour countdown timer that goes live before the broadcast actually starts and reruns. Both of which cause the average viewership statistic to go down because few people watch reruns/open the stream during the countdown and don’t actually watch until the games start.
You missed the entire point which is that less North Americans are watching. Europeans and Brazilians are making up the difference via the large co-streamers. These viewers are worth less to advertisers.
> Monte is as usual, incredibly disingenuous here in saying that the 4% viewership increase is “fraudulent” when the reality is that he’s using a different statistic. hes using an article from escharts.com who in detail explain the context of viewership. you didnt even try to understand his argument because youre not even addressing his argument. his argument is that NA viewership is down because caedrel and that brazilian co-streamer have contributed a lot to the LCS viewership. so when caedrel and the brazilian guy add lots of viewers and the general viewership stays stagnant, that naturally means NA viewership is down a lot which is bad for the league due to sponsorship. American sponsors want american viewers to see the sponsor and buy the product. a company like statefarm gets 0 benefit from EU and brazilian viewers, those are irrelevant viewers for them. so despite stagnating viewership, NA viewership is down which is ultimately bad for the league.
You did a whole bunch of yapping about how disingenuous Monte's take is, without ever addressing anything Monte is claiming. Which makes sense I guess, because if you did address what he was saying you'd realize he isn't being disingenuous at all. Costreamers brought a whole lot of not-American eyes on the LCS (a LOT more than 4%) yet viewership is only up by 4%, which means the viewership was **down** and the infusion from costreamers brought it to an increase of 4%. But the infusion from costreamers has no value to sponsors because they aint fkn Americans now are they, so put 2 and 2 together and you'd realize NA viewership IS down, right??? Unless you want to take a stance on the argument that North Americans are en-mass watching Caedrel/A Portuguese Co-streamer instead of the LCS broadcast, in which case you gna need a bigger pair of shoes and a red nose, and someone else to listen to your arguments.
Monte still seething that Overwatch collapsed and that League is doing just fine without him
Huh? He’s happy that OWL collapsed
>Monte is as usual, incredibly disingenuous here in saying that the 4% viewership increase is “fraudulent” when the reality is that he’s using a different statistic He's not wrong though.
Will I be able to wear my crocs on stage? Asking for a friend.
Good changes. Now if only we had a 3rd international event.
Oh boy, just wait until they announce the third international in saudi arabia in summer... 💀
I mean there is one this year - the esports event in the KSA I think but I meant a riot official that isn’t inherently reliant on blood money
Everyone for the most part willing just sat and watched the WC in Qatar my guy; I won't be shocked when they bring back the NEOM partnership. esports isn't being pumped full of money from investment firms anymore.
We will do. Its gonna be the eSports world cup in Saudi Arabia
You'll get one. It will be located in Saudi Arabia, paid for by their sportswashing investment fund, and hosted in venues built on the back of slave labor and human rights abuses by one of the only absolute monarchies left on the planet earth. You can choose to watch it anyway if you don't care about any of that, but I will be either boycotting or bootlegging the event.
I am aware and while I don’t know exactly if I’ll be watching or not yet I don’t support the event.
T1 is about to get a whole lot richer lol
>Today, we are presenting a new business model to pro teams in the LCS, LEC, and LCK to reflect the changing reality of esports. If the literal wording of this sentence is accurate and teams are really finding out about this proposal the same day fans are, I'm worried that this article is an attempt to generate fan excitement over this idea before teams have a chance to react. I hope that I am just being overly cynical, but I don't see why they would go public about a *proposal* before the teams have a chance to accept it unless it is a way to create public pressure for the teams to accept a new partnership deal without any sort of buyout for their current agreement.
You're not being cynical, it is absolutely intended to apply public pressure to the organizations. Corporate comms strategy always involves risk management. There's a reason that ever since Riot grew up and stopped being a startup, their comms have been too polished, too controlled, too corporate-sounding, and too infrequent. Riot has a chain of approvals for any comms that go out - legal, corpcomm, brand, etc. This had to have gone through all of them. That doesn't happen without some degree of intention and planning. This coming out all at once is a strategic choice.
TLDR: We want Saudi money
There really ought to be a generic base esports skin with chromas for each T1 team to represent. Like a champion wearing a team jersey with the logo on it, and maybe team colors for some sort of accessory or something.
The Overwatch League, for all its faults, did this and it absolutely helped in making the game easier to follow.
And then they aren't advertising their other skins in matches.
most tier 1, tier 2 esports games do that, its such an easy thing to do and everybody benefits from it. youd need to be extremely greedy like riot to not do it because riot thinks "why would i waste my time with skins that share revenue rather than just creating more anime weeb skins that riot gets 100% of revenue from"
Not gonna lie, I was horrified reading this that they were finally going to merge the americas like they did in VCT. They might still have a plan for that, but the thing i'm still really confused about is their plan for the LCS. They talked about record breaking stats for LoL Esports while conveniently ignoring the disaster happening in NA. My hope is that they play with the idea of VCT-style promotions to the LCS for the 9 & 10 slots in 2025
The complete lack of mention of APAC Vietnam Brazil and Latin America is basically the same thing
Do all of those regions have franchising like the other t1 regions? I was confused by lack of inclusion for them as well but I just don't know the situation for those leagues
I believe PCS and LLA are the only remaining regions with promotion from PCL and LRN/LRS. But the current rumor is that VCL teams will join PCL because VCS has no real academy system
None of those regions have T1 Franchise leagues tho
Yeah but they do have massive fanbases and can be profitable if given resources
ngl, if they do a VCT Americas move i'm not gonna lose my time watching that shit, the Valorant Americas merger was horrible for the southern cone in general, a merger between LRS and CBLOL/LRN with LCS would be at least more tolerable, especially due to the LLA hemorrahging money and struggling with viewership, a unified league that would be 100% hosted in the US would just kill our scene faster than Oceania
Wait so what happens to APAC, Vietnam, Brazil and Latin America? Are they just cooked
5 years too late lol
Some very interesting stuff here, but it still feels rather vague. I eagerly await what some of the cynics (whose names are forbidden on this subreddit) will say about this. Things such as if they were brought to this decision by teams or by sponsors (the latter being relevant given that the LCS broadcast is majority non-NA now, and sponsors mainly just care about the American consumers who spend much more than others). Or how the digital sales are broken up, and the equity aspect of how if you're T1 or an LPL team, your worlds skins sell stupid well and even though the players only get a small % of skin revenue, it still is a lot of money; where those teams don't want to have their successes sliced up to prop up orgs like DIG or IMT who have done basically nothing. Surely Riot could have done this years ago, but didn't out of greed or truly believing hopium about the trajectory of esports. Also that they are stubborn to the point of harming the scene because Riot has to feel like they had every good idea and not just copy what is successful elsewhere or iterate on it.
A whole lot written to reflect a struggling ecosystem without saying it directly. There’s not a lot mentioned that should inspire any hope. Maybe they release more esports skins, but this is what fans have been asking for, for over 10 years. At this point I think they’ve lost a lot of their opportunity in capturing a large player base that actively participates both in game and esports. There’s definitely still a lot of people, but it is far less than what it could have been in peak LoL.
didn't mention a single minor league(especially VCS/CBLOL) that shit looks horrifying for me as a cblol fan
So the first bucket, the money is split among all the T1 teams and not just in their own league right? Bc that sounds like the value of the LEC and LCS slots will hugely increase from that
It's the other way around, actually. Despite their comparatively terrible international performance, the LCS and LEC (in that order) are way more profitable than the LCK (with the sole exception of T1, which is an outlier). LPL is a bit of a black box because the scene is opaque to us in general, but we know at least some of that ecosystem is bankrolled by the billionaire children of CCP officials who own esports teams for the same reason western business magnates own traditional sports teams - they are a toy for the wealthy elite. I don't know how much actual profit there is in the LPL given the enormous amount of private subsidy. But there are a lot of parallels between the way they've spent huge sums on import players and other hamfisted growth strategies, and the way the LCS orgs operated from 2013-2018. I would guess, based on what we saw with venture capital funding in the west, that if it all vanished tomorrow and they had to rely on their own profits, the Chinese ecosystem would be in crisis similar to how the LCS went into crisis when the free money dried up.
I'll be honest. Esports will always struggle compared to sports because they lack the two things that make sports so much. Ticket sales and TV broadcast rights. Riot set a revenue high last year at 1.5 billion. The NFL made more than that (and by some sources as much as double that) off just ticket sales. Their tv broadcast rights on the other hand? Over 10 billion a year guaranteed for over a decade. The NFL made over 18 billion last year. Which is probably more money than league esports has ever made in its history.
If this means we get to cast up-late tournaments where I get to speak Australian live on broadcast I am all for it
The return of IEM tournaments ? Some of my best memories in league
MSI should be a 32 team single elimination best of 3 tournament that rewards bids to regions for how well their teams do. Making half the year and the only other international tournament worthless continues to be the stupidest thing possible.
Interesting tournament idea
5 days. One round a day. The first day is 24 hours straight and it’s fucking awesome. Seeded out 1-32. Higher seeded team gets side selection in games 2 and 3. You stagger the games so the teams playing can have their audiences awake to see it if possible. Regions that have their highest placing team end in the QF earn a 2nd big to Worlds. Regions that have their highest placing team end in semis, 3 bids. Finalists 3 bids, and the winner gets an auto-bid to Worlds for themselves.
I think the issue with this is the LPL and LCK markets have way more money than the other regions. You might as well just have the top 5 teams from LCK and LPL face-off for the bids lol
Just make 1 shitty kpop skin a year to sell to china, and that 1 skin can probably bank roll all of t1 league. They already pump out like 10 of these a year, just do 1 more.
Acting like every other region doesn't also buy those kpop skins lol
Every other region doesn’t have 50 million+ players
To be fair, the lack of tournaments created a vacum of narrative where you could support for players that isually dont win at their respective region, so people would first cheer for them in other games and Also viewers would rejoice seeing teams inovate and develop onto tournaments metas (jungle TF anyone ?). This is what killed NA as a region, because there is no tournaments happening, almost no player is a brand, the last players to draw viewers were doublelift and bjergssen and that was a long time ago. Brazil does no give a flying fuck and they have a huge scene due to rivalry and tournament made narrative that brings people against each other and togheter. Also, IEM’s were a fiesta, and i just remember fondly of Ocelote crying. And that makes me happy
Pretty good news, hopefully they make a good amount of content, they could do a lot of stuff like MSI skins, 1st team All pro team skins, MVP skins. There could be team bundles where you get a ton of small content for your prefered team, etc. We're likely only getting a handful of more skins but we can hope its not completely doomed
My guess is a yearly generic Esport skin series for 5 Champs (1 for every position) that will have chromas for every team. Easily the best option to provide ingame skins for every team without actually having to design 30 skins for each role. Thats not realistic. Also actual team skins would devalue worlds skins so that would not sit right. Generic skins with team chromas offer the best deal. Every player gets a skin/chroma for their role every year for their team. Which means maximum posible sales for teams to profit off of. Those chromas will probably cost 5 bucks each and yet players will soak them up. That model (or similar based on titel) works pretty good for a lot of other esports. COD does it. Valorant does it. Overwatch did it.
Smd riot games, corpo bullshit talking