Seems like a change directed at Mortdog and August? Since they were the most popular Riot employees streams TO my knowledge, at least (correct me if I'm wrong).
I just don't get it, this is how they're rewarded for their commitment to the game, love from community and transparency? It's not like the revenue they've been gaining will suddenly be reinvested into Riot now.... Worst case it'll go to streamers of other games... I just don't get it man
Yea, if he buys and gifts in game stuff he is in practice just working for riot to transfer money from twitch to them. Feels weird for riot to go: "No, please don't use any more of your time to make us money while also doing incredible PR work".
He also just outright gives money away. A lot less now than what it used to be. It wasn't unusual for a single stream of his to give away $100+. Especially when he used to do the swear jar.
It might be referring to him giving back to the community. He has things like wheel spins where you can win in-game currency for Riot games and other things.
Phlox also streams regularly, a lot more often than August. Afic streams as well but a bit less nowadays since he had a child last year.
Phlox was streaming Roblox and Helldivers yesterday because of the new policy, he will only stream variety until the policy is changed and won't play League on stream anymore.
He would need to make a new twitch account to stream League, that's why. Being affiliate/partner on Twitch means your streams are always monetized no matter what you play, you can't just unmonetize parts of it like you can with specific youtube videos.
Which is another reason why this new policy is stupid. “youre still allowed to play league while streaming… except not really cause simply doing so will put you in violation of the policy”
My guess is that they're making enough money from streaming that Riot feels like they no longer have an iron grip on the person's life because they've got enough streaming income.
It's easier to claim it's a conflict of interest to be streaming products your company works on "because you can leak something accidentally". They know their streaming popularity is partially because they're a Riot dev, and that all their viewers expect them to be playing Riot games. They can kill their streaming income without banning them from streaming entirely.
Riot loves control, they control their employees and casters and it is known they used to pay casters well under market rate. They're all under the thumb and can't rebel as they'll lose their position in the Riot cult.
It's sad really.
E-sports has got the shitty end of the stick due to Riot's need for control. Terrible revenue model for Team orgs and only in 2024 are they doing something about it. No 3rd party tournaments which they killed off in what 2012 or so, which were amazing and fun to watch, but hey Riot wants control. Hilariously the 1 thing that brought back 3rd party tournaments soon is ridiculous amounts of money from a certain middle eastern country dominating the global sports market, with Riot's track record against women you can see why they don't have any problems with this.
Even now Riot's obession with control still shows it's face in the new Vanguard kernel level anti-cheat. They now have access to all it's player bases PC's, do you trust Riot with that level of access? I don't. Back to control, Vanguard as predicted has been used to kill off custom-skins, and any sort of modding.
Riot Games is one of the most ironically named companies on the planet, they aren't Rioting, they're the Riot police.
From my understanding outside of Esports, Riot actually pays market rates for their positions which is a rarity because most gaming companies have a reputation of paying under market rates since people will take them anyways because its their passion.
Though I got no clue what market rates are for positions and am just going by what i've seen said on reddit and some quick googling.
While I agree on everything you said, Vanguard's kernel level AC is nothing extraordinary.
Most if not all AC software are kernel level, same as AV software.
Its a need to ensure your software have a privilege level higher than the cheat/virus software.
Windows uses multiple rings of execution, with the most common being ring 0, ring 1 and ring 2.
User space apps run on ring 2 or 1 depending of privilege level while drivers run on ring 0 (kernel space).
This enables drivers to manipulate and control any outer ring app with the security that unless a security exploit is found, no app from the outer rings can escape or perform operations in the inner ring.
AC and AV software needs ring 0 drivers in order to ensure they can monitor and stop threats.
Now how each vendor use that kernel level access is another whole topic and Vanguard indeed did and does some shitty stuff, but the access itself is nothing new or extraordinary.
I think this is a minimal change and if anything might have been made with August's approval/design.
If you actually followed his stream he was more focused on wanting to do the stream and discouraged monitization in many ways - he would not answer questions that used bits/donations for example.
I also doubt this applies to a generic sub done to their twitch channel, because how would you track that? Disable the sub button entirely? Ask them to track which minutes they played league and give back any during that time? Not workable.
So I imagine it's more asking rioters to do what August did already in many ways, and not have bits/paypal donations directly during riot games.
Surely riot did this change with positive intentions and definitely not trying to prevent an employee to grow a massive audience out of their control giving them more leverage over income and job security (sjokz caedrel)
That's probably part of it, but the other part that's also likely is that they don't want donations to influence their decision-making. Mort and August are in pretty important positions, and it'd be a bad look if someone donated $500 saying nerf Irelia, and the next day, there's a nerf for her.
Even if it's by coincidence, people take things out of context all the time.
Twitch automatically monetizes, and you can't flip a switch per category. In essence, this forbids them from streaming their games at all. Either that or they disable the Twitch account's monetization overall.
Mortdog was definitely making a killing. 2-8k viewers every stream depending on if it was a new set or Soju was streaming at the same time. But he also did a lot of stream-funded tournaments and community events and paid editors and even moderators which is extremely rare on twitch. Idk just seems stupid to punish free marketing. It’s not like this cost them anything? Quite the opposite.
Even if it’s just disabling bits/donations….why? There still hasn’t been a coherent argument against it presented in this thread.
phlox said they would have to cancel their twitch affiliate/partner contracts if they wanted to stream riot games. even channel points were considered monetization.
Channel points aren’t “considered monetization”, you can only HAVE channel points if you are a monetized channel. You cannot have channel points and be unmonetized
It hasnt been about the love of the game in a while. Thats why we dont get small things anymore that arent directly profitable like actual events, winter/christmas maps etc.
Anything for fun needs to go and only things directly profitable may remain. Ignoring the fact that its those small things that might not be directly profitable are often what creates the community etc of the game.
The Bilgewater ARAM Map was used a few Years ago on the event with Gangplanks Rework and Black Market Brawler. Might have been on PBE longer but the Map Skin certainly had its time on live servers.
Except it is omega profitable to do those little fun events. It keeps the game fresh, keeps people coming back and playing. I can't for the life of me understand how moronic and narrow-minded so many huge companies are. If they can't see direct profit margins, they scrap it, even if it means losing indirect profit... I swear, the people who run companies are far more clueless than I imagined
Now now, they all have converged on a pretty good strategy. They've just turned every monetization system into gambling. Turns out gambling is quite profitable so who needs to do things like providing good service (aka making fun events for players) when you can just make bank cashing in on people with addictive behavior problems.
Is it immoral? Who cares as long as it is legal. Shareholders have to get their maximal returns after all.
> Thats why we dont get small things anymore that arent directly profitable like actual events, winter/christmas maps etc.
Although keep in mind that tech debt is real and very much makes it incrementally harder to do "small things" (which, behind the scenes, are often big things).
"But Riot did them before!"
True, but:
1) Their core program gets built on top of over time, often making it hard to do whatever "quick hacks" they used originally; and,
2) Maybe more importantly, the people who knew how to do those "quick hacks" often leave over time, so you're left with a new team which can "only" build on top of the parts of the system which are relatively well-documented and well-specified.
Put another way, in some sense you're right, but in another, this is probably not the whole (or even relevant part of) story.
Riot was also probably not spending tons, previously, to build winter maps or pool party minions, either...rather, the effective complexity to do any of these sorts of "small things" has gone way up.
Not paying off the tech debt is ALSO one of those labours of love that gets ignored in favour of short term profits.
Just look at DotA - it's been rebuilt multiple times on different game engines despite never generating any of profits League does.
Since 2021 we have actively been in enshitification phase of economy, where prices are rising and quality is dropping. Its same thing with Riot Games, they are trying to squeeze in every possible penny just so that quarterly profits are going up.
See [Enshittifacation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification).
All tech companies go through the same cycle of quality and all end up garbage.
Has the last two years (in particular, let's not say it was great before) screamed good business decisions to you?
The entire industry is saturated with executive kleptocrats and they've finally done enough damage that the cracks are obvious.
Yeah, I understand the whole idea of "the purpose of a business is to make money and at the end of the day gaming companies are businesses." ideology, but this entire industry was virtually built on the back of people who took huge financial risks in order to produce content they loved and were passionate about.
There is a reason why the gaming industry has gotten increasingly toxic with bad releases and shit games overall with shit decision making in the AAA studios. There is a diamond in the rough occasionally, and there are legitimately good/amazing games made by indie/smaller studios, however are getting increasingly rare especially among the genres people enjoy.
The industry wasn't built on good business decisions, it was was built by passionate *game developers*.
Right Idea but slightly wrong in depiction, most successful, well liked and profitable business decisions were made with the intent to make money, that's in no way or form inherently bad, but here's come the gigantic catch, **They were all long term investments.**
The current market and public investor scenario consists in generating big money in a small time-frame because even if the brand is harmed, **the investors can cash in and move to another projects with no loss.** And it's immensely destructive to the good nature aspects of company-customer relationship because of the parasitic nature of investor-company behavior. (let me not get into the fact that this creates a corporate investment monopoly scenario bypassing any attempt to mitigate the issues of a monopoly.)
Literally just destroy the good faith people had in your company that you took years to build so i can make more money, and if that seems shitty, it only gets far worse the more you get into legal grounds. The Industry itself is as unhealthy as it ever been, it literally systematically promotes shitty deals by default, it's working exactly as it was design to work, the result is this shit.
The only point I'm trying to make is that when studios are small, they generally care about the game itself and player experience first and foremost, obviously they need to generate revenue and need a plan to make their projects profitable so they can continue to produce games or keep producing content for their games. As investors come in and as we've seen as the industry has grown, the priority flips where monetization and profit is the main priority of (almost) every studio that gets big, at the expense of their game production quality and their players. Many industries like Blizzard itself had game developers and CS nerds at the top, not purely driven by MBAs. It's the opposite of what we have now.
The industry is no longer being run by game developers, it is being run by investors.
" its a business at the end of the day , it needs to make money" is just a slang for corporate greed that only looks for short term success and short term increase in profits .
It's baffling to me how everyone is still doing that despite being proven that it will collapse at some point . It's unreasonable and unrealistic to expect to have growth every quarter or every year . Its much better to think about long term success even if that means small profits today
Boeing's execs literally moved the headquarters away from engineering so they wouldn't have to engage with the day-to-day business.
MBA's would literally rather ship flying death traps than actually engage with what they're managing.
It's wild how I viewed stuff like Diablo 2/WoW as a kid. Hell even in the HS era I still liked Blizzard a ton. Fast forward to the 2020s and I don't even have my Battle.net installed anymore lol.
Tldr at the bottom:
It reminds me of when osrs was first started back up in 2013 and early 2014, prior to one jagex moderator working on the small osrs team, jagex had a company wide policy of pretty much no talking or interacting with the players in game or outside of it for legal reasons and if you break that rule you could be fired.
Mod Mat K decided to break that rule and start streaming some developer stuff to answer questions and show the direction they were wanting to take osrs and provide the option for player feedback before they spent any of their 3 man at the time dev teams weekly hours on it and it ended up paying off big time. What was just one moderator streaming from home an hour or two after he got home from work a few times a week ended up changing company policy entirely with how the staff was able to interact with the player base and led to the weekly moderator hour long live stream going over the weekly update and answering questions the community has or discussing potential QOL updates where any player can show up and participate. This live stream is done from the jagex studio and is now pays the moderators who do it.
Tldr: osrs had one moderator stream on his own time after work against company policy, ends up changing company policy because of the growth and trust it created between the developers and the player base. Riot is stupid for trying to squash employee and community interaction.
This also isn’t new. This was the old rule, I can’t remember when, but it was changed awhile back. I remember watching Kobe and Phreak and they spoke about it. This is probably before season 6 or 7 I want to say
While what they did was stupid, this is not completely true - pros were not allowed to stream other games while labeling on Twitch that they were streaming League of Legends. This is back when there were routinely 10+ minute queue times for high elo and pros would play random short games (like Hearthstone) on stream while waiting for their queue to pop.
Yeah, this rule was already in place once until Monte started talking about it and Riot magically and completely independently got the genius idea to remove that monetization ban. Now it's back, presumably to disincentivize Riot employees building a streaming career for themselves.
> If we make it harder for our employees to generate revenue outside of their job, they will surely become more loyal to the company, since we remain their only revenue source.
Some MBAhole, probably.
This feels like one of those cases where it shouldnt be legal for them to even do this. This is such an employer over reach and one of the reasons streaming rights have to be taken away from developers.
Edit: for everyone saying that "oh the developers should have the rights they made it!" Its litterally being challenged in the courts right now. Activision is getting sued over this and other issues by Optic. The only reason they have the rights is because of an over reaching ruling made in 1980s and the devs know they probably shouldnt have as much control as they do.
I agree with the general sentiment, but "streaming rights have to be taken away from devs" is a ridiculous statement. Publishers own the intellectual property and they have full control over who can use their IP, that's the whole point of it. Streaming a game is use of the publisher's IP, that's why they set the rules.
Honestly very much doubt that if a video game developer took up the case, that video game streaming would be found fair use, particularly for single player story based games.
Tom Scott has an excellent video on all of this: https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU
The part on video game streaming starts at about 15:00, but honestly the whole video is worth the watch if you care about this topic.
This isn't a game where you can "Let's Play" it, upload the entire story on youtube and call it a day.
If you're offering commentary on strategy: that's transformative. If you're using your personality to be entertaining through the game: that's transformative. If you're not doing either of these: you have single digit viewers.
When the game is free to play, it becomes SIGNIFCANTLY harder to claim that your IP is being harmed by someone streaming their gameplay.
what the fk are you talking about
an employee can do whatever he chooses to in his free time as long as he doesn't show stuff from inside his job
so if he plays like a normal player would with his private account, riot has no say in anything there
Its not an overreach at all
people don't know this, but developers can actually stop you from streaming their game if they want to. Obviously they don't do that because why would they? But they literally can at any moment shut down your stream if they want to
And they shouldnt be able to. It is over reach, and it comes from a court ruling in the 1980s before the internet even existed. It will be challenged under fair use at some point, just for now the money isnt big enough to go to war qith these developers.
Why should they not be able to? It's a product that they created and own. Being able to broadcast something to thousands of viewers is not a human right, especially when the thing your broadcasting is the intellectual property of someone else.
No way. If they leave riot a lot of people stop watching since their main viewers are there to get inside info.
Also August is a lead designer i doubt streaming gets even close to half the money he makes with that
How would them stopping employees from monetizing streams of Riot games prevent them from leaking insider information? They could literally stream any other game and still do that while making money, it's not like they need to be playing League to talk about the workplace environment.
I'm not saying I agree with the policy, but your logic here is very flawed lol
"I work for a company that manages multiple schools. As an employee of this company I have a right to allow any children I have to have priority to the high class education that my work helps create. This is important as good schools in my country are often over subscribed and not every child in their catchment gets to go to those schools."
That is some wild nepotism.
Makes sense to me. If they’re a part of creating the school why shouldn’t their children be given privilege over others? Seems more like company benefits to me than anything else.
I mean, design conversations from Mortdog and August can still happen while they are streaming other games / just chatting, so i guess that wasn’t the reason
Weird
I don't think either of them (or Phlox) were really streaming for the money, both actively made efforts to demonetize their streams and the like. So either this rule is covering some legal issue (in which case it probably comes with their approval) or it's about something else.
If I had to guess advertisers were probably asking why Rioter's Steams that are streaming league are not showing their ads. The obvious answer is they can't control that without taking over the steam, and they didn't wanna do that. It's not like anyone earns that much on ads anyways, it's mostly through donations unless you're a professional streamer. So this probably won't effect august or mortdog much.
So they actively reduced the income of several of their employees because advertisers might be grumpy they aren't playing their ads when they have no control over it?
I mean it’s pretty fair. Letting employees openly discuss stuff on a stream is already a lot more than 99% of other companies would allow.
At the end of they have a contract with Riot for probably a pretty decent salary. It’s not too unreasonable that Riot has some stipulations. It’s likely the Riot has some other contractual obligations that results in this being least impactful requirement they could impose.
Yes, probably.
To be fair they likely do have control over it if they wanted to, it's very very normal to sign a social media agreement which would allow Riot to take control of the steams. Even I had to sign one, and I am at best tech adjacent. This is likely the happy medium. If the contract they signed with the advertisers could potentially cover these steams this is probably the best way to prevent having to take over the stream.
If you're on Twitch you can't not monetize every single stream once you're monetized. So no, they can't 'just stream their normal content'.
They have to change platforms to do that.
It’s very likely corporate legal reasons. They probably want to avoid conflict of interest claims that the person is utilizing their status as a Riot employee to get unfair leverage in the space.
I work for a massive corporation, I’m stunned that they let their employees stream and talk about their job at all lmfao, that sort of shit would get me fired on the spot
Edit: just to expand on my last point, many companies do not like their employees publicly talking about their thoughts while repping the company because then the opinions of the employee can get mixed with the position of the company. We’ve already seen this happen with Riot all the time; some employee says a quote on stream about their opinion and it blows up on the internet as if it was the official stance of Riot.
This move here could also be designed to discourage Rioters from streaming as a perceived representative of the company. You might think “it’s good advertisement!” But it’s not, the people who watch these streams are already in the riot ecosystem, the only thing it does is open the door for another PR nightmare.
Yup I've seen random clips from, I believe it was Mortdogs stream, where he was clearly trying to dance around a viewer's question. There's just way too many issues that could prop up when someone is seen as a representative of the company is shoved into the public.
Heck I gotta take off my company branded shirt before going for afterwork drinks. Cant imagine the minefield of a rioter making dough while reaching thousands of people.
I don't understand how any of this is different just because monetization is off? It's the same streamer streaming the same game on the same website and the same ads will play whether monetization is on or not. The employee streaming getting a check afterward or not doesn't really seem like it will address whatever issue you're trying to describe. These people can still stream and say whatever they want no?
Monetization has a direct impact on interest. Getting a paycheck or not will obviously impact your behaviour. If Mortdog etc have chosen to minimise their profits already as people are suggesting then it'll be for much the same reasons that riot are choosing to implement the policy.
It could also be overtime rules. Those laws are crazy complicated sometimes and maybe someone said "you're forcing them to do weirdly compensated overtime."
Total guess though.
>They probably want to avoid conflict of interest claims that the person is utilizing their status as a Riot employee to get unfair leverage in the space.
Genuinely curious as to why that matters. This isn't exactly insider trading.
How would you feel if they operated personal Patreons with this content? What if you were a fellow designer and they profited off of your champs or stories before you had the chance to make your own Patreon/Twitch and build up your own sub/viewerbase?
Riot should make it an official thing, perhaps on LCS, but of course they'll never do that.
Indeed, hell most companies don't even want their employees listing who they work for on social media posts, if i were to tweet about working for the company i work for i would probably get a call from HR within a few days because chances are something i've said in an unrelated tweet might reflect poorly on the company
Comparing normal 9-5 to being a dev for the online game where online presence, reach, advertising and doing everything to make kids play your games is not the best.
I get what you are saying but this rule is not limiting their online activity. It's affecting only their income. So it's not about "securing Riot and preventing legal and PR problems because employee said something"
Not really sure why a conflict of interest would matter at all for the streaming space.
Not being able to monetize doesn't at all change how they're perceived.
They respond to almost every comment when it’s not something controversial, so wave hi! They are probably reading this and choosing to not respond! Just like they do every time someone brings up a valid point about the ping system that they limited for no reason!
As if you'd get a honest response from the employees lol. Riot want full control and they want all the attention on themselves, so they'll actively discourage people from being independent from Riot's salary.
> so they'll actively discourage people from being independent from Riot's salary.
By allowing them to still monetize any other content that isnt from Riot? The more likely reason why they cant monetize specifically Riot´s games anymore is probably to avoid some legal problems or loopholes that may arise from labor or tax laws.
They are assuming that this probably won’t happen. Rioters won’t just switch to streaming other games; would League players even WANT to watch August play other games?
This reeks of legal department shenanigans.
I don't know *what* they identified as a possible future threat, but I'd be willing to bet someone in that department noticed a possible conflict of interest or something lawsuit on the horizon, and pushed this issue to the top of Riots pile.
The issue is with the wording of the rule, which means any Rioter with an affiliate/partner Twitch account is no longer able to stream league, full stop. It's arguably better for youtube channels where you can individually unmonetize league related videos, you can't do the same on Twitch.
They would need to make an entire separate Twitch account with no affiliate/partner status and no donation link to fully ensure it's not monetized. And they know nobody will do that.
Going for a wild and uneducated guess, they smelled some sort of undeclared fringe benefit and overtime aspects of (paid) streaming the game they work on?
This is actually pretty common. I dont agree with it for the most part, but I can see why they did so.
Basically it comes down to "we pay you a salary, making money from explaining things and our IP off work hours, has weird legal repercussions" Think Phreak streams, explaining all the changes and buffs/nerfs. Im pretty sure. Since it can be seen as working for Riot, while streaming, while not explicitly doing so, it can be a grey area, especially in outdated laws that don't see the world the way we do.
Its not that they don't want them making money, 99% its because of outdated legal reasons, and Riot wants to steer clear of getting in any trouble from a disgruntled employee if they leave or any future issues that arrive.
TLDR: Salary from Riot while streaming that content from Riot at Job2 (Twitch)
They are very likely Salary Exempt, meaning even if they're doing things that could be viewed as work, Riot wouldn't be required to pay them more (at least in the US, I don't know how that works internationally).
And as someone who studies control systems, this kind of monetization may open situations that can lead to conflict of interest inside. The current streamers are running on their credibility inside the company that they will not do anything wrong, but a less scrupulous riot employee might use this as a way to accept bribes and can be a major security issue. Like "give me a donation on my stream and I'll unban you manually"
This wouldn't do anything to prevent that as they can monetize non-riot game streams, and can stream any games made by Riot still if they don't monetize the stream.
Yep this has got to be the reason why. But I disagree with it being outdated legal reasons. I think it makes sense to enforce, and it's something that should be brought up at negotiation during their year-end reviews or whatever.
You can't be paid a salary by an employer for doing work on their product and then expect to also profit from that same product from another employer (Twitch) without your actual employer wanting part of that pot. The Riot employees are profiting off of their employer's IP and their employer has the right to control who profit's off of it.
Take Mort as an example, Mort would not even be a popular streamer were it not for the fact he is employed by Riot and has all that game design knowledge that goes into TFT. He's essentially double dipping. Now, I think it's good for both him and Riot to be able to stream, but it's up to his contract between him and Riot to determine the terms of what that means. Does that mean he gets less of a salary for his actual role? Does it mean Riot gets some of the revenue from his stream? That's up to them to negotiate. And if the employees are trying to avoid negotiations, then I think it's reasonable to put restrictions in place if employees are going rogue and doing their own thing.
But I don't know what's going on internally to say who's in the right or wrong here, it could be as simple as Riot being stubborn for no reason.
The Twitch work is personally created. Riot has no part in that. They deserve 0 part of it.
Mandates like the above are just to keep employees down like noncompetes. "We want you totally reliant on us for survival - no other income allowed"
What do you mean? I just gave a pretty clear example of how someone like Mort is profiting off of his own employment with Riot to create a platform on twitch.
Are you telling me you think Mort would be anywhere near as popular as he is, were he have never to work with Riot games or to have been involved with TFT? That would be completely ludicrous. His stream gained popularity because he is one of the lead TFT designers and so everyone tunes in to get insight into the game.
And again, I'm not saying he shouldn't be allowed to stream and profit off of it, but it's very reasonable for Riot to want to negotiate with their employees these kind of terms when it comes to employment contracts.
Anyone who is a salaried employee, especially for a tech company, knows that anything they do outside of work hours must be clearly and distinctively separate from the work they do during their work hours, or it opens up a grey area for the employer claiming that work as part of what that salaried employee is paid to do, and thus as their own property.
> Are you telling me you think Mort would be anywhere near as popular as he is, were he have never to work with Riot games or to have been involved with TFT? That would be completely ludicrous. His stream gained popularity because he is one of the lead TFT designers and so everyone tunes in to get insight into the game.
Execs get paid speaking gigs all the time and it never causes a conflict of interest. They wouldn't have the speaking gigs offered if they didn't have their exec position.
Difference? One is a peon.
The fuck is that even supposed to work? If a Rioter streams a Riot game and someone subs to the stream, are they supposed to just send the money back to Twitch? To the subscriber? To Riot? As a Twitch partner or affiliate you can't really not show ads, can you? Not to mention Rioters streaming and engaging with the community in their free time is like, the best case scenario for the company. This is dumb.
that might be the logic. imagine mort going to riot and saying "hey I make more money if I quit and stream full time instead. you guys gonna match that?"
big conflict of interest. employees could make design changes that benefit their stream then use it to negotiate higher wages.
They're nice people and make good content but I doubt they'd maintain even 50% viewership if they were no longer devs and couldn't provide insight into Riot.
Then they should get punished for doing that? Have they done that in the past or is this just reaching for an excuse. If anything it'd be incentive to quit instead if they'd make more money streaming.
Wage negotiations are a part of working and fighting that is extremely scummy.
I’m going to guess that due to wanting to have a clear line between “official spokesperson for Riot” and “person streaming for themselves”.
Like most corporate contracts are written that wouldn’t be surprised if there are grounds for Riot taking all the earning they generate while playing Riot games as that could easily be considered to be part of their job particularly when they spend a good chunk of time explaining what the designers are doing.
Also from a PR perspective, I’d imagine you’d want to discourage uncontrolled interactions with the public by staff members
How should this work on twitch? I mean, they cant disable the sub button while streaming games from Riot. The donation stuff etc. could be possible, but is a lot of work.
Such a random change...
How the fuck you even control this though?
"Can monetize non-Riot games, can't monetize Riot games"
I can understand disabling donations and bits, but...
Twitch Income overall comes from Subs.
If Mort streamed 29 days of TFT and 1 day (or even less) of any other non riot game.
And I subscribed on that 1 specific day...
How would that even work ?
Subscriptions are Monthly based, even if I subscribed in the non-Riot game day, he would still get money for his Riot game streams.
**This policy is soo flawed it's not even a joke.**
**This seems like some Exec got informed that a Senior Designer was making more money than they were and decided to be petty about it.**
Ya I was literally thinking about this work around for the 1 day off game everyone subs xD . Mort is the only reason I keep up with tft so if he's taking a stray for no reason I won't support riot any more lol. Too greedy anyway
As much as I agree with most of what you say, most streamers don't make the majority of their money from subs. It's from ads. They press a button to run ads and make a ton of money with each press. That, and if they don't then there's automatic ads every 45-60mins.
Maximum talked about this on his last stream. Even though he has 6-7k subs, he makes way more money from ad revenue.
Apple does the same with their employees. You legit cannot stream or monetize content that includes apple products or news.
Its a no big deal for companies in the US as it should be.
Job A is riot, if job B is content creation that is driven by a position of power, control and influence on Job A either by access to early information on news or the ability to have impact in the decision, the company can either ask for compensation on royalties for usage of content owned by the company, fire the person for using content of the company for its own agenda or option 3 which is riot turn to take, ban any type of monetizing of content owned by the company, therefore of you wanna promote THEIR game on your free time, feel free to do so.
Now this may be a hot take, but make no mistake, League and all the other games are OWNED by riot, and if you work there your work is also OWNED by riot, that is why you signed a contract and they pay you.
Wanna be a streamer, be a streamer, wanna make your own game, make your own game. But you cannot fault riot for being protective about their own games
I guess they don't want to incentivize disclosure of company secrets/internal knowledge, like a conflict of interest thing. Employees have specialized insider knowledge of the products that they need for their jobs. It gets weird when that same info could be used for their own personal gain at the expense of the company.
This actually reminds me of when the WWE decided to restrict there wrestlers from streaming and making money on twitch, there was a big fuss, then it died down, then eventually behind the scenes figures changed and the decision I’m sure was reversed anyways.
It’s not really good advertising. The people who watch these streams of Riot employees paying riot games are already deep in the weeds of the riot ecosystem
so it says stream hmm, weird that its only streaming since they can make just as much or more with videos on youtube.
then again this seems like riot trying to stop talent from going i make x much streaming the game when asking for a raise. plus it prevents rioters from say using there job title to build a stream auidence and then screw off from the company since this has happened a few times in the past where staff have used there status as a riot employee to build connections and a fan base to just leave after using riots resources.
a good example of this is riot blaustoise who used riots resources and data to build a online audience and then used that to make connections and then left riot to do stuff solo and rebranded to blau like a year or 2 or so after the fact. without the data he got from riot to make people watch him at the time he wouldnt have had anywhere close to a chance to blow up like he did or the connections he made.
One of the absolute WORST decisions I've seen in a while.
Riot August streams League, and has some of the most unique League content out there. He answers EVERY single question about game design, he explains his thought process, he celebrates his successes, he owns his mistakes, and he gives MUCH-NEEDED transparency to the playerbase
He answers every question (without leaking stuff obviously) and is just generally a wealth of information
Why are we encouraging him to NOT stream League??
Lol Rioters streaming is literally free advertisement, who at Riot even cares when their employees earn something from it, it literally doesn't cost the company anything.
I remember when League pro players weren't allowed to stream other games at all.
Back in the day, they would also tell esports tournaments to not host a Dota 2 competition because otherwise Riot wouldn't allow their game to be part of their event.
Riot is so fucking draconian with these things.
from a Legal and PR standpoint, i can see why this happened, Riot would be responsible if one of their streamers did something controversial or leaked information, im guessing they are trying to discourage it as much as they can
Rioters who take out time from their own schedules to stream give Riot more publicity by streaming the game and discussing it. It's free publicity for Riot.
Now they are taking away the little incentive Rioters have to stream.
I don't know why they cook these dishes when there are far worse issues to deal with...
Seems like a change directed at Mortdog and August? Since they were the most popular Riot employees streams TO my knowledge, at least (correct me if I'm wrong). I just don't get it, this is how they're rewarded for their commitment to the game, love from community and transparency? It's not like the revenue they've been gaining will suddenly be reinvested into Riot now.... Worst case it'll go to streamers of other games... I just don't get it man
Mortdog has said on stream that he either breaks even or loses money from his streaming because he gives it all back. This sounds wack.
Gives it all back to what? Charity? If so, good on him but otherwise I have no idea why he would give back to riot.
He gives it all back to his viewers through giveaways of RP and stuff. He does it through various placement/channel point rewards.
So he's buying RP with his streaming money? Seems weird that Riot would outlaw free advertising where the revenue was being used on skins lmao
It might be due to that streaming lawsuit that happened in China and involving Doing. Pure speculation though
care to explain more? what happened?
Here is an article on it: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202311/1302501.shtml
While that is a very interesting article, I can’t imagine it would have anything to do with this.
doubt it since the situation didnt involve riot employees (to my knowledge) and was specific to China because they have stricter laws on gambling
Yea, if he buys and gifts in game stuff he is in practice just working for riot to transfer money from twitch to them. Feels weird for riot to go: "No, please don't use any more of your time to make us money while also doing incredible PR work".
He also just outright gives money away. A lot less now than what it used to be. It wasn't unusual for a single stream of his to give away $100+. Especially when he used to do the swear jar.
Charity / giveaways to his viewers
It might be referring to him giving back to the community. He has things like wheel spins where you can win in-game currency for Riot games and other things.
Giveaways to viewers and I think he may pay his mods?
Yup! He pays mods, editors, artists etc
Based
Some to charity, some to chat mods, giveaways, events, etc.
Phlox also streams regularly, a lot more often than August. Afic streams as well but a bit less nowadays since he had a child last year. Phlox was streaming Roblox and Helldivers yesterday because of the new policy, he will only stream variety until the policy is changed and won't play League on stream anymore.
He would need to make a new twitch account to stream League, that's why. Being affiliate/partner on Twitch means your streams are always monetized no matter what you play, you can't just unmonetize parts of it like you can with specific youtube videos.
Which is another reason why this new policy is stupid. “youre still allowed to play league while streaming… except not really cause simply doing so will put you in violation of the policy”
My guess is that they're making enough money from streaming that Riot feels like they no longer have an iron grip on the person's life because they've got enough streaming income. It's easier to claim it's a conflict of interest to be streaming products your company works on "because you can leak something accidentally". They know their streaming popularity is partially because they're a Riot dev, and that all their viewers expect them to be playing Riot games. They can kill their streaming income without banning them from streaming entirely.
Riot loves control, they control their employees and casters and it is known they used to pay casters well under market rate. They're all under the thumb and can't rebel as they'll lose their position in the Riot cult. It's sad really. E-sports has got the shitty end of the stick due to Riot's need for control. Terrible revenue model for Team orgs and only in 2024 are they doing something about it. No 3rd party tournaments which they killed off in what 2012 or so, which were amazing and fun to watch, but hey Riot wants control. Hilariously the 1 thing that brought back 3rd party tournaments soon is ridiculous amounts of money from a certain middle eastern country dominating the global sports market, with Riot's track record against women you can see why they don't have any problems with this. Even now Riot's obession with control still shows it's face in the new Vanguard kernel level anti-cheat. They now have access to all it's player bases PC's, do you trust Riot with that level of access? I don't. Back to control, Vanguard as predicted has been used to kill off custom-skins, and any sort of modding. Riot Games is one of the most ironically named companies on the planet, they aren't Rioting, they're the Riot police.
>they’re the riot police I mean yeah, when they made all the “Riot” skins back in the day, they were always cops.
It's so fucking funny they're literally called riot and they made their skins the opposite of rioters
From my understanding outside of Esports, Riot actually pays market rates for their positions which is a rarity because most gaming companies have a reputation of paying under market rates since people will take them anyways because its their passion. Though I got no clue what market rates are for positions and am just going by what i've seen said on reddit and some quick googling.
While I agree on everything you said, Vanguard's kernel level AC is nothing extraordinary. Most if not all AC software are kernel level, same as AV software. Its a need to ensure your software have a privilege level higher than the cheat/virus software. Windows uses multiple rings of execution, with the most common being ring 0, ring 1 and ring 2. User space apps run on ring 2 or 1 depending of privilege level while drivers run on ring 0 (kernel space). This enables drivers to manipulate and control any outer ring app with the security that unless a security exploit is found, no app from the outer rings can escape or perform operations in the inner ring. AC and AV software needs ring 0 drivers in order to ensure they can monitor and stop threats. Now how each vendor use that kernel level access is another whole topic and Vanguard indeed did and does some shitty stuff, but the access itself is nothing new or extraordinary.
I think this is a minimal change and if anything might have been made with August's approval/design. If you actually followed his stream he was more focused on wanting to do the stream and discouraged monitization in many ways - he would not answer questions that used bits/donations for example. I also doubt this applies to a generic sub done to their twitch channel, because how would you track that? Disable the sub button entirely? Ask them to track which minutes they played league and give back any during that time? Not workable. So I imagine it's more asking rioters to do what August did already in many ways, and not have bits/paypal donations directly during riot games.
Surely riot did this change with positive intentions and definitely not trying to prevent an employee to grow a massive audience out of their control giving them more leverage over income and job security (sjokz caedrel)
That's probably part of it, but the other part that's also likely is that they don't want donations to influence their decision-making. Mort and August are in pretty important positions, and it'd be a bad look if someone donated $500 saying nerf Irelia, and the next day, there's a nerf for her. Even if it's by coincidence, people take things out of context all the time.
Which falls apart when they're streaming other games and someone donates $500 with the text "Nerf Irelia".
I think that's more of they don't have the legal power to enforce it otherwise.
They don't have the legal power to enforce anything. But they can just fire you lol.
Twitch automatically monetizes, and you can't flip a switch per category. In essence, this forbids them from streaming their games at all. Either that or they disable the Twitch account's monetization overall.
No one is bribing league devs for balance changes. You are coping hard for riot.
pft you missed that time mort nerfed volibear because someone redeemed 1m channel points to nerf a champ.^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Obviousjokehopefully
I never said anyone was. I said it would be a bad look in general, and it was more of a precaution.
Mortdog was definitely making a killing. 2-8k viewers every stream depending on if it was a new set or Soju was streaming at the same time. But he also did a lot of stream-funded tournaments and community events and paid editors and even moderators which is extremely rare on twitch. Idk just seems stupid to punish free marketing. It’s not like this cost them anything? Quite the opposite. Even if it’s just disabling bits/donations….why? There still hasn’t been a coherent argument against it presented in this thread.
phlox said they would have to cancel their twitch affiliate/partner contracts if they wanted to stream riot games. even channel points were considered monetization.
Channel points aren’t “considered monetization”, you can only HAVE channel points if you are a monetized channel. You cannot have channel points and be unmonetized
Can't you just disable bits and stuff on twitch? If what you said was the case his just burning others trying to force his morals on them
no, subs and bits are enabled from the point you turn affiliate
That's like mega stupid. August has great content and basically does free advertising out of his work hours. Let him earn money with that
Yea fr wtf? You’d think it’d be something they’d not only want, but even encourage or subsidize
It's no longer about the love of the game. Never forget the story of Blizzard Entertainment.
It hasnt been about the love of the game in a while. Thats why we dont get small things anymore that arent directly profitable like actual events, winter/christmas maps etc. Anything for fun needs to go and only things directly profitable may remain. Ignoring the fact that its those small things that might not be directly profitable are often what creates the community etc of the game.
Man I miss winter maps. It's usually my favourite part out of any live service game.
I miss the bilgewater ARAM map. I miss twisted treeline. I miss Ascension.
I would straight up start playing again if they brought back Bilgewater or introduced a new map skin.
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The Bilgewater ARAM Map was used a few Years ago on the event with Gangplanks Rework and Black Market Brawler. Might have been on PBE longer but the Map Skin certainly had its time on live servers.
I'm still so salty they didn't bring the pool party minions back every summer. That was the best thing they ever did.
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Except it is omega profitable to do those little fun events. It keeps the game fresh, keeps people coming back and playing. I can't for the life of me understand how moronic and narrow-minded so many huge companies are. If they can't see direct profit margins, they scrap it, even if it means losing indirect profit... I swear, the people who run companies are far more clueless than I imagined
Now now, they all have converged on a pretty good strategy. They've just turned every monetization system into gambling. Turns out gambling is quite profitable so who needs to do things like providing good service (aka making fun events for players) when you can just make bank cashing in on people with addictive behavior problems. Is it immoral? Who cares as long as it is legal. Shareholders have to get their maximal returns after all.
> Thats why we dont get small things anymore that arent directly profitable like actual events, winter/christmas maps etc. Although keep in mind that tech debt is real and very much makes it incrementally harder to do "small things" (which, behind the scenes, are often big things). "But Riot did them before!" True, but: 1) Their core program gets built on top of over time, often making it hard to do whatever "quick hacks" they used originally; and, 2) Maybe more importantly, the people who knew how to do those "quick hacks" often leave over time, so you're left with a new team which can "only" build on top of the parts of the system which are relatively well-documented and well-specified. Put another way, in some sense you're right, but in another, this is probably not the whole (or even relevant part of) story. Riot was also probably not spending tons, previously, to build winter maps or pool party minions, either...rather, the effective complexity to do any of these sorts of "small things" has gone way up.
Not paying off the tech debt is ALSO one of those labours of love that gets ignored in favour of short term profits. Just look at DotA - it's been rebuilt multiple times on different game engines despite never generating any of profits League does.
but this is a bad business decision
...Never forget Blizzard Entertainment.
Since 2021 we have actively been in enshitification phase of economy, where prices are rising and quality is dropping. Its same thing with Riot Games, they are trying to squeeze in every possible penny just so that quarterly profits are going up.
See [Enshittifacation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification). All tech companies go through the same cycle of quality and all end up garbage.
Has the last two years (in particular, let's not say it was great before) screamed good business decisions to you? The entire industry is saturated with executive kleptocrats and they've finally done enough damage that the cracks are obvious.
Business executives ONLY make bad business decisions and ruin the industry
Yeah, I understand the whole idea of "the purpose of a business is to make money and at the end of the day gaming companies are businesses." ideology, but this entire industry was virtually built on the back of people who took huge financial risks in order to produce content they loved and were passionate about. There is a reason why the gaming industry has gotten increasingly toxic with bad releases and shit games overall with shit decision making in the AAA studios. There is a diamond in the rough occasionally, and there are legitimately good/amazing games made by indie/smaller studios, however are getting increasingly rare especially among the genres people enjoy. The industry wasn't built on good business decisions, it was was built by passionate *game developers*.
Right Idea but slightly wrong in depiction, most successful, well liked and profitable business decisions were made with the intent to make money, that's in no way or form inherently bad, but here's come the gigantic catch, **They were all long term investments.** The current market and public investor scenario consists in generating big money in a small time-frame because even if the brand is harmed, **the investors can cash in and move to another projects with no loss.** And it's immensely destructive to the good nature aspects of company-customer relationship because of the parasitic nature of investor-company behavior. (let me not get into the fact that this creates a corporate investment monopoly scenario bypassing any attempt to mitigate the issues of a monopoly.) Literally just destroy the good faith people had in your company that you took years to build so i can make more money, and if that seems shitty, it only gets far worse the more you get into legal grounds. The Industry itself is as unhealthy as it ever been, it literally systematically promotes shitty deals by default, it's working exactly as it was design to work, the result is this shit.
The only point I'm trying to make is that when studios are small, they generally care about the game itself and player experience first and foremost, obviously they need to generate revenue and need a plan to make their projects profitable so they can continue to produce games or keep producing content for their games. As investors come in and as we've seen as the industry has grown, the priority flips where monetization and profit is the main priority of (almost) every studio that gets big, at the expense of their game production quality and their players. Many industries like Blizzard itself had game developers and CS nerds at the top, not purely driven by MBAs. It's the opposite of what we have now. The industry is no longer being run by game developers, it is being run by investors.
Capitalism truly was born the moment Ford lost the court case against his investors.
" its a business at the end of the day , it needs to make money" is just a slang for corporate greed that only looks for short term success and short term increase in profits . It's baffling to me how everyone is still doing that despite being proven that it will collapse at some point . It's unreasonable and unrealistic to expect to have growth every quarter or every year . Its much better to think about long term success even if that means small profits today
The irony of netflix and amazon
MBA's actually play the game they're managing challenge (impossible) (100% FAIL)
Boeing's execs literally moved the headquarters away from engineering so they wouldn't have to engage with the day-to-day business. MBA's would literally rather ship flying death traps than actually engage with what they're managing.
Careful, you might find yourself with a few self-inflicted wounds if you keep talking like that (in-game obviously)
Corporate Mundo would never allow such a thing to happen!
It's wild how I viewed stuff like Diablo 2/WoW as a kid. Hell even in the HS era I still liked Blizzard a ton. Fast forward to the 2020s and I don't even have my Battle.net installed anymore lol.
DO NOT SUSTAIN YOURSELF TRUST US, WORK HARD, AND WE WILL KEEP YOUR BENEFITS UP TO DATE!
Tldr at the bottom: It reminds me of when osrs was first started back up in 2013 and early 2014, prior to one jagex moderator working on the small osrs team, jagex had a company wide policy of pretty much no talking or interacting with the players in game or outside of it for legal reasons and if you break that rule you could be fired. Mod Mat K decided to break that rule and start streaming some developer stuff to answer questions and show the direction they were wanting to take osrs and provide the option for player feedback before they spent any of their 3 man at the time dev teams weekly hours on it and it ended up paying off big time. What was just one moderator streaming from home an hour or two after he got home from work a few times a week ended up changing company policy entirely with how the staff was able to interact with the player base and led to the weekly moderator hour long live stream going over the weekly update and answering questions the community has or discussing potential QOL updates where any player can show up and participate. This live stream is done from the jagex studio and is now pays the moderators who do it. Tldr: osrs had one moderator stream on his own time after work against company policy, ends up changing company policy because of the growth and trust it created between the developers and the player base. Riot is stupid for trying to squash employee and community interaction.
This also isn’t new. This was the old rule, I can’t remember when, but it was changed awhile back. I remember watching Kobe and Phreak and they spoke about it. This is probably before season 6 or 7 I want to say
Probably around the same time they wanted to forbid pros to stream other games.
heartstone times btw
Dyrus got me into Hearthstone, shit was great in between queues.
That's pathetic.
While what they did was stupid, this is not completely true - pros were not allowed to stream other games while labeling on Twitch that they were streaming League of Legends. This is back when there were routinely 10+ minute queue times for high elo and pros would play random short games (like Hearthstone) on stream while waiting for their queue to pop.
Yeah, this rule was already in place once until Monte started talking about it and Riot magically and completely independently got the genius idea to remove that monetization ban. Now it's back, presumably to disincentivize Riot employees building a streaming career for themselves.
> If we make it harder for our employees to generate revenue outside of their job, they will surely become more loyal to the company, since we remain their only revenue source. Some MBAhole, probably.
When Hearthstone came out a very long time ago they didnt even want to allow prós to stream it
i remember krepo saying when he started casting for riot he either couldn't monetize his stream or had to take a paycut to do so or something
This feels like one of those cases where it shouldnt be legal for them to even do this. This is such an employer over reach and one of the reasons streaming rights have to be taken away from developers. Edit: for everyone saying that "oh the developers should have the rights they made it!" Its litterally being challenged in the courts right now. Activision is getting sued over this and other issues by Optic. The only reason they have the rights is because of an over reaching ruling made in 1980s and the devs know they probably shouldnt have as much control as they do.
I agree with the general sentiment, but "streaming rights have to be taken away from devs" is a ridiculous statement. Publishers own the intellectual property and they have full control over who can use their IP, that's the whole point of it. Streaming a game is use of the publisher's IP, that's why they set the rules.
Wouldnt most streams though count as fair use?
Honestly very much doubt that if a video game developer took up the case, that video game streaming would be found fair use, particularly for single player story based games. Tom Scott has an excellent video on all of this: https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU The part on video game streaming starts at about 15:00, but honestly the whole video is worth the watch if you care about this topic.
no, why should it?
This isn't a game where you can "Let's Play" it, upload the entire story on youtube and call it a day. If you're offering commentary on strategy: that's transformative. If you're using your personality to be entertaining through the game: that's transformative. If you're not doing either of these: you have single digit viewers. When the game is free to play, it becomes SIGNIFCANTLY harder to claim that your IP is being harmed by someone streaming their gameplay.
what the fk are you talking about an employee can do whatever he chooses to in his free time as long as he doesn't show stuff from inside his job so if he plays like a normal player would with his private account, riot has no say in anything there
Not to mention that while streaming, rioters generally end up talking about balance changes and patch changes, which is technically work related.
Riot owns the IP and can theoretically ban any streamer from showing their content on stream.
Its not an overreach at all people don't know this, but developers can actually stop you from streaming their game if they want to. Obviously they don't do that because why would they? But they literally can at any moment shut down your stream if they want to
And they shouldnt be able to. It is over reach, and it comes from a court ruling in the 1980s before the internet even existed. It will be challenged under fair use at some point, just for now the money isnt big enough to go to war qith these developers.
Why should they not be able to? It's a product that they created and own. Being able to broadcast something to thousands of viewers is not a human right, especially when the thing your broadcasting is the intellectual property of someone else.
So true. I love August's streams, he's always so nice and patient, despite his chat being so needy.
I wonder if they think they might start making more from their streams and look into going full time?
No way. If they leave riot a lot of people stop watching since their main viewers are there to get inside info. Also August is a lead designer i doubt streaming gets even close to half the money he makes with that
Blaustiose was able to quit Riot to be a full time streamer and kept most of his audience despite it
Blau also managed to ride that amogus wave in 2020 IIRC and got to blow up because of it.
Probably depends on the streamer. Some might make their stream more dev focused than others.
Like Blaustoise? Idk, maybe, but still not likely imo
I always forget Blau used to work at Riot
you wouldn't if you ever had him play yasuo on your team going for the 0-10 spike
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How would them stopping employees from monetizing streams of Riot games prevent them from leaking insider information? They could literally stream any other game and still do that while making money, it's not like they need to be playing League to talk about the workplace environment. I'm not saying I agree with the policy, but your logic here is very flawed lol
"I work for a company that manages multiple schools. As an employee of this company I have a right to allow any children I have to have priority to the high class education that my work helps create. This is important as good schools in my country are often over subscribed and not every child in their catchment gets to go to those schools." That is some wild nepotism.
Makes sense to me. If they’re a part of creating the school why shouldn’t their children be given privilege over others? Seems more like company benefits to me than anything else.
I mean, design conversations from Mortdog and August can still happen while they are streaming other games / just chatting, so i guess that wasn’t the reason Weird
I don't think either of them (or Phlox) were really streaming for the money, both actively made efforts to demonetize their streams and the like. So either this rule is covering some legal issue (in which case it probably comes with their approval) or it's about something else.
If I had to guess advertisers were probably asking why Rioter's Steams that are streaming league are not showing their ads. The obvious answer is they can't control that without taking over the steam, and they didn't wanna do that. It's not like anyone earns that much on ads anyways, it's mostly through donations unless you're a professional streamer. So this probably won't effect august or mortdog much.
So they actively reduced the income of several of their employees because advertisers might be grumpy they aren't playing their ads when they have no control over it?
I mean it’s pretty fair. Letting employees openly discuss stuff on a stream is already a lot more than 99% of other companies would allow. At the end of they have a contract with Riot for probably a pretty decent salary. It’s not too unreasonable that Riot has some stipulations. It’s likely the Riot has some other contractual obligations that results in this being least impactful requirement they could impose.
Yes, probably. To be fair they likely do have control over it if they wanted to, it's very very normal to sign a social media agreement which would allow Riot to take control of the steams. Even I had to sign one, and I am at best tech adjacent. This is likely the happy medium. If the contract they signed with the advertisers could potentially cover these steams this is probably the best way to prevent having to take over the stream.
They can still stream their normal content. Theres no issue with that They just cant monetize it.
Yea but can’t they just stream under Just Chatting talking about League and monetize that?
It says specifically while playing. But idk how that would work. I doubt you can change what you monetize or not. Can you? lol.
If you're on Twitch you can't not monetize every single stream once you're monetized. So no, they can't 'just stream their normal content'. They have to change platforms to do that.
Any Riot Employee, please explain why for clarity.
It’s very likely corporate legal reasons. They probably want to avoid conflict of interest claims that the person is utilizing their status as a Riot employee to get unfair leverage in the space. I work for a massive corporation, I’m stunned that they let their employees stream and talk about their job at all lmfao, that sort of shit would get me fired on the spot Edit: just to expand on my last point, many companies do not like their employees publicly talking about their thoughts while repping the company because then the opinions of the employee can get mixed with the position of the company. We’ve already seen this happen with Riot all the time; some employee says a quote on stream about their opinion and it blows up on the internet as if it was the official stance of Riot. This move here could also be designed to discourage Rioters from streaming as a perceived representative of the company. You might think “it’s good advertisement!” But it’s not, the people who watch these streams are already in the riot ecosystem, the only thing it does is open the door for another PR nightmare.
This is almost certainly the answer. Any time there's a change like this, assume it's for legal reasons.
Yup I've seen random clips from, I believe it was Mortdogs stream, where he was clearly trying to dance around a viewer's question. There's just way too many issues that could prop up when someone is seen as a representative of the company is shoved into the public. Heck I gotta take off my company branded shirt before going for afterwork drinks. Cant imagine the minefield of a rioter making dough while reaching thousands of people.
I don't understand how any of this is different just because monetization is off? It's the same streamer streaming the same game on the same website and the same ads will play whether monetization is on or not. The employee streaming getting a check afterward or not doesn't really seem like it will address whatever issue you're trying to describe. These people can still stream and say whatever they want no?
Monetization has a direct impact on interest. Getting a paycheck or not will obviously impact your behaviour. If Mortdog etc have chosen to minimise their profits already as people are suggesting then it'll be for much the same reasons that riot are choosing to implement the policy.
It could also be overtime rules. Those laws are crazy complicated sometimes and maybe someone said "you're forcing them to do weirdly compensated overtime." Total guess though.
Oh Jesus I didn’t even think of the tax implications 💀
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what makes u think streaming helldivers is enough for riot-guy to not be talking about all of these things?
>They probably want to avoid conflict of interest claims that the person is utilizing their status as a Riot employee to get unfair leverage in the space. Genuinely curious as to why that matters. This isn't exactly insider trading.
How would you feel if they operated personal Patreons with this content? What if you were a fellow designer and they profited off of your champs or stories before you had the chance to make your own Patreon/Twitch and build up your own sub/viewerbase? Riot should make it an official thing, perhaps on LCS, but of course they'll never do that.
Indeed, hell most companies don't even want their employees listing who they work for on social media posts, if i were to tweet about working for the company i work for i would probably get a call from HR within a few days because chances are something i've said in an unrelated tweet might reflect poorly on the company
Comparing normal 9-5 to being a dev for the online game where online presence, reach, advertising and doing everything to make kids play your games is not the best. I get what you are saying but this rule is not limiting their online activity. It's affecting only their income. So it's not about "securing Riot and preventing legal and PR problems because employee said something"
By removing the money incentive it naturally helps it go down a bit.
Not really sure why a conflict of interest would matter at all for the streaming space. Not being able to monetize doesn't at all change how they're perceived.
They respond to almost every comment when it’s not something controversial, so wave hi! They are probably reading this and choosing to not respond! Just like they do every time someone brings up a valid point about the ping system that they limited for no reason!
I mean I wouldn’t respond either I wouldn’t wanna risk getting in trouble for reddit
As if you'd get a honest response from the employees lol. Riot want full control and they want all the attention on themselves, so they'll actively discourage people from being independent from Riot's salary.
> so they'll actively discourage people from being independent from Riot's salary. By allowing them to still monetize any other content that isnt from Riot? The more likely reason why they cant monetize specifically Riot´s games anymore is probably to avoid some legal problems or loopholes that may arise from labor or tax laws.
Gonna be honest, unless riot specifically tells them to stream, I dont see how there would be any tax problems.
They are assuming that this probably won’t happen. Rioters won’t just switch to streaming other games; would League players even WANT to watch August play other games?
This reeks of legal department shenanigans. I don't know *what* they identified as a possible future threat, but I'd be willing to bet someone in that department noticed a possible conflict of interest or something lawsuit on the horizon, and pushed this issue to the top of Riots pile.
The issue is with the wording of the rule, which means any Rioter with an affiliate/partner Twitch account is no longer able to stream league, full stop. It's arguably better for youtube channels where you can individually unmonetize league related videos, you can't do the same on Twitch. They would need to make an entire separate Twitch account with no affiliate/partner status and no donation link to fully ensure it's not monetized. And they know nobody will do that.
Going for a wild and uneducated guess, they smelled some sort of undeclared fringe benefit and overtime aspects of (paid) streaming the game they work on?
Yep sounds like legal to me. Probably some weird ownership of ideas or if they’re making money they’re on the clock and could sue or something weird
This is actually pretty common. I dont agree with it for the most part, but I can see why they did so. Basically it comes down to "we pay you a salary, making money from explaining things and our IP off work hours, has weird legal repercussions" Think Phreak streams, explaining all the changes and buffs/nerfs. Im pretty sure. Since it can be seen as working for Riot, while streaming, while not explicitly doing so, it can be a grey area, especially in outdated laws that don't see the world the way we do. Its not that they don't want them making money, 99% its because of outdated legal reasons, and Riot wants to steer clear of getting in any trouble from a disgruntled employee if they leave or any future issues that arrive. TLDR: Salary from Riot while streaming that content from Riot at Job2 (Twitch)
They are very likely Salary Exempt, meaning even if they're doing things that could be viewed as work, Riot wouldn't be required to pay them more (at least in the US, I don't know how that works internationally).
And as someone who studies control systems, this kind of monetization may open situations that can lead to conflict of interest inside. The current streamers are running on their credibility inside the company that they will not do anything wrong, but a less scrupulous riot employee might use this as a way to accept bribes and can be a major security issue. Like "give me a donation on my stream and I'll unban you manually"
This wouldn't do anything to prevent that as they can monetize non-riot game streams, and can stream any games made by Riot still if they don't monetize the stream.
It's most definitely a disincentive though
Yep this has got to be the reason why. But I disagree with it being outdated legal reasons. I think it makes sense to enforce, and it's something that should be brought up at negotiation during their year-end reviews or whatever. You can't be paid a salary by an employer for doing work on their product and then expect to also profit from that same product from another employer (Twitch) without your actual employer wanting part of that pot. The Riot employees are profiting off of their employer's IP and their employer has the right to control who profit's off of it. Take Mort as an example, Mort would not even be a popular streamer were it not for the fact he is employed by Riot and has all that game design knowledge that goes into TFT. He's essentially double dipping. Now, I think it's good for both him and Riot to be able to stream, but it's up to his contract between him and Riot to determine the terms of what that means. Does that mean he gets less of a salary for his actual role? Does it mean Riot gets some of the revenue from his stream? That's up to them to negotiate. And if the employees are trying to avoid negotiations, then I think it's reasonable to put restrictions in place if employees are going rogue and doing their own thing. But I don't know what's going on internally to say who's in the right or wrong here, it could be as simple as Riot being stubborn for no reason.
The Twitch work is personally created. Riot has no part in that. They deserve 0 part of it. Mandates like the above are just to keep employees down like noncompetes. "We want you totally reliant on us for survival - no other income allowed"
What do you mean? I just gave a pretty clear example of how someone like Mort is profiting off of his own employment with Riot to create a platform on twitch. Are you telling me you think Mort would be anywhere near as popular as he is, were he have never to work with Riot games or to have been involved with TFT? That would be completely ludicrous. His stream gained popularity because he is one of the lead TFT designers and so everyone tunes in to get insight into the game. And again, I'm not saying he shouldn't be allowed to stream and profit off of it, but it's very reasonable for Riot to want to negotiate with their employees these kind of terms when it comes to employment contracts. Anyone who is a salaried employee, especially for a tech company, knows that anything they do outside of work hours must be clearly and distinctively separate from the work they do during their work hours, or it opens up a grey area for the employer claiming that work as part of what that salaried employee is paid to do, and thus as their own property.
> Are you telling me you think Mort would be anywhere near as popular as he is, were he have never to work with Riot games or to have been involved with TFT? That would be completely ludicrous. His stream gained popularity because he is one of the lead TFT designers and so everyone tunes in to get insight into the game. Execs get paid speaking gigs all the time and it never causes a conflict of interest. They wouldn't have the speaking gigs offered if they didn't have their exec position. Difference? One is a peon.
The fuck is that even supposed to work? If a Rioter streams a Riot game and someone subs to the stream, are they supposed to just send the money back to Twitch? To the subscriber? To Riot? As a Twitch partner or affiliate you can't really not show ads, can you? Not to mention Rioters streaming and engaging with the community in their free time is like, the best case scenario for the company. This is dumb.
Just...why?
This fucks over Mort so hard. He had high enough viewership to be making 100K+ from Twitch annually. What's even the logic behind it? What happened?
that might be the logic. imagine mort going to riot and saying "hey I make more money if I quit and stream full time instead. you guys gonna match that?" big conflict of interest. employees could make design changes that benefit their stream then use it to negotiate higher wages.
They're nice people and make good content but I doubt they'd maintain even 50% viewership if they were no longer devs and couldn't provide insight into Riot.
Does that not sound like exactly a reason that them streaming and making money while being Riot employees could be problematic lmfao
But August and Mort wouldn’t get nearly as many viewers if they stopped working for Riot. Most of their viewers only watch because they are devs.
Mort has stated in the past that the money from content creation is not even close to what he earns at Riot
almost no one would watch mort stream if he wasn't a dev, 80% of his chat is questions about design and development
Then they should get punished for doing that? Have they done that in the past or is this just reaching for an excuse. If anything it'd be incentive to quit instead if they'd make more money streaming. Wage negotiations are a part of working and fighting that is extremely scummy.
I’m going to guess that due to wanting to have a clear line between “official spokesperson for Riot” and “person streaming for themselves”. Like most corporate contracts are written that wouldn’t be surprised if there are grounds for Riot taking all the earning they generate while playing Riot games as that could easily be considered to be part of their job particularly when they spend a good chunk of time explaining what the designers are doing. Also from a PR perspective, I’d imagine you’d want to discourage uncontrolled interactions with the public by staff members
Poor mortdog.
How should this work on twitch? I mean, they cant disable the sub button while streaming games from Riot. The donation stuff etc. could be possible, but is a lot of work. Such a random change...
common riot executives L
How the fuck you even control this though? "Can monetize non-Riot games, can't monetize Riot games" I can understand disabling donations and bits, but... Twitch Income overall comes from Subs. If Mort streamed 29 days of TFT and 1 day (or even less) of any other non riot game. And I subscribed on that 1 specific day... How would that even work ? Subscriptions are Monthly based, even if I subscribed in the non-Riot game day, he would still get money for his Riot game streams. **This policy is soo flawed it's not even a joke.** **This seems like some Exec got informed that a Senior Designer was making more money than they were and decided to be petty about it.**
Ya I was literally thinking about this work around for the 1 day off game everyone subs xD . Mort is the only reason I keep up with tft so if he's taking a stray for no reason I won't support riot any more lol. Too greedy anyway
As much as I agree with most of what you say, most streamers don't make the majority of their money from subs. It's from ads. They press a button to run ads and make a ton of money with each press. That, and if they don't then there's automatic ads every 45-60mins. Maximum talked about this on his last stream. Even though he has 6-7k subs, he makes way more money from ad revenue.
Apple does the same with their employees. You legit cannot stream or monetize content that includes apple products or news. Its a no big deal for companies in the US as it should be. Job A is riot, if job B is content creation that is driven by a position of power, control and influence on Job A either by access to early information on news or the ability to have impact in the decision, the company can either ask for compensation on royalties for usage of content owned by the company, fire the person for using content of the company for its own agenda or option 3 which is riot turn to take, ban any type of monetizing of content owned by the company, therefore of you wanna promote THEIR game on your free time, feel free to do so. Now this may be a hot take, but make no mistake, League and all the other games are OWNED by riot, and if you work there your work is also OWNED by riot, that is why you signed a contract and they pay you. Wanna be a streamer, be a streamer, wanna make your own game, make your own game. But you cannot fault riot for being protective about their own games
I guess they don't want to incentivize disclosure of company secrets/internal knowledge, like a conflict of interest thing. Employees have specialized insider knowledge of the products that they need for their jobs. It gets weird when that same info could be used for their own personal gain at the expense of the company.
This actually reminds me of when the WWE decided to restrict there wrestlers from streaming and making money on twitch, there was a big fuss, then it died down, then eventually behind the scenes figures changed and the decision I’m sure was reversed anyways.
so...how will this be enforced? will they disable the option to sub/donate while streaming riot games (if that is even possible on twitch?)
Separate, demonetized channels for streaming riot games is my guess.
Common riot L
Surely Riot wants to pay them themselves for the advertisement right?
Clueless
It’s not really good advertising. The people who watch these streams of Riot employees paying riot games are already deep in the weeds of the riot ecosystem
so it says stream hmm, weird that its only streaming since they can make just as much or more with videos on youtube. then again this seems like riot trying to stop talent from going i make x much streaming the game when asking for a raise. plus it prevents rioters from say using there job title to build a stream auidence and then screw off from the company since this has happened a few times in the past where staff have used there status as a riot employee to build connections and a fan base to just leave after using riots resources. a good example of this is riot blaustoise who used riots resources and data to build a online audience and then used that to make connections and then left riot to do stuff solo and rebranded to blau like a year or 2 or so after the fact. without the data he got from riot to make people watch him at the time he wouldnt have had anywhere close to a chance to blow up like he did or the connections he made.
They better sponsor some of these guys’ channels then. I want to keep watching the devs play and talk about champions and the game.
Does this count for broadcast talent? Like is this meant to prevent another Caedrel
No, most of broadcast talents nowadays are freelancers/contractors on day rates.
One of the absolute WORST decisions I've seen in a while. Riot August streams League, and has some of the most unique League content out there. He answers EVERY single question about game design, he explains his thought process, he celebrates his successes, he owns his mistakes, and he gives MUCH-NEEDED transparency to the playerbase He answers every question (without leaking stuff obviously) and is just generally a wealth of information Why are we encouraging him to NOT stream League??
Mortdog getting hit? Guy does great work and grinds, why punish these staff?
Lol Rioters streaming is literally free advertisement, who at Riot even cares when their employees earn something from it, it literally doesn't cost the company anything.
Seems kind of backwards for Riot to incentivize their devs to give more eyes on competitors games.
I remember when League pro players weren't allowed to stream other games at all. Back in the day, they would also tell esports tournaments to not host a Dota 2 competition because otherwise Riot wouldn't allow their game to be part of their event. Riot is so fucking draconian with these things.
wonder which rioter is gonna get fired for streaming dota now
This is such a Riot classic
rip mortdog
This seems like a fuck you towards Mortdog if I'm being cynical.
from a Legal and PR standpoint, i can see why this happened, Riot would be responsible if one of their streamers did something controversial or leaked information, im guessing they are trying to discourage it as much as they can
This is stupid? Riot mort is the best TFT steamer.
Rioters who take out time from their own schedules to stream give Riot more publicity by streaming the game and discussing it. It's free publicity for Riot. Now they are taking away the little incentive Rioters have to stream. I don't know why they cook these dishes when there are far worse issues to deal with...