Half a season has passed since Riot Games rebuilt the business framework of its North America League of Legends Championship Series, and the consensus in the esports world is that the product doesn’t seem that much different yet.
Riot has signed just one new league-level sponsor, State Farm, since the developer sold 10 long-term spots in the league in 2017 and abandoned relegation and promotion. There’s been no news from its media and development deal with BAMTech. Average concurrent viewership on Twitch for the game declined by about 14 percent year-over-year for the spring split, but it remains by far the best-watched esports property, according to The Esports Observer Audience Insights.
“A lot of what you’re seeing this year are seed-planting,” said Avi Bhuiyan, executive vice president of esports at Catalyst Sports & Media. “The things that are going to look dramatically different will hopefully take place in the next eight to 12 months.”
The biggest change to the LCS in the spring split, the half-season that will culminate in spring finals on April 8 in Miami, had nothing to do with the franchising: Matches were simplified from a best-of-three format to a single battle, giving fans far more certainty over when games start and finish.
Also, the competitive results have been unusual. Team SoloMid, winner of six of the 10 splits (half-seasons) ever played in the LCS, finished third and lost in the quarterfinals. Two new teams — Clutch Gaming and 100 Thieves, owned by Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta and Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, respectively, made the March 31 semifinals.
The gradual pace of commercial change in the LCS is, to a degree, by design. Unlike the startup Overwatch League, Riot was offering teams the chance to buy into a proven commodity, with the benefit of an established fan base and revenue streams that give them the luxury of building over time.
The things that are going to look dramatically different will hopefully take place in the next eight to 12 months.
Avi Bhuiyan
Catalyst sports & Media
Behind the scenes, Riot officials say one of the biggest changes has been a closer working relationship with the 10 teams, which now share in league revenue and don’t face relegation, giving them the freedom to make long-term decisions. Riot surprised many insiders by bringing four new teams into the league, each with its own marketing and content-creation expertise: 100 Thieves; Clutch Gaming; Golden Guardians, owned by the Golden State Warriors; and OpTic Gaming, the best-followed endemic esports organization in the U.S.
League teams now sit on marketing, finance and content committees, and have provided valuable input on decisions that used to be made centrally.
“We’re thrilled with where we are heading into Miami,” said Jarred Kennedy, co-head of esports for Riot. “We’re guaranteed a new champion, which is very exciting. And we’re seeing some of the new franchises step up and lead, not just on the [field of play] but also in some of the ways they’re developing fan bases and building the brands.”
If league-level sponsorship has been slow to come since franchising, some of the teams have fared better with more certainty to sell. Dell’s Alienware gaming PC brand paid Team Liquid, owned by Ted Leonsis and a consortium of traditional sports and entertainment executives, $4.5 million for naming rights to a new training facility in Santa Monica, Calif., Leonsis said at February’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
“We invested well over a million and a half dollars into the facility itself, and that’s not something we would have done if we knew we could have been relegated from the league six months later,” said Team Liquid co-CEO Steve Arhancet.
Several sources in the sponsorship industry said Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch League has been more aggressive in pursuing partnership deals at the upper tier of American esports. Overwatch has signed HP Omen, Intel, Toyota, T-Mobile and Sour Patch Kids since its launch.
But whereas the Overwatch League is the single focus of publisher Activision’s esports efforts, Riot manages a global community of League of Legends competitions at various levels in widely disparate markets. It also has the cushion of billions in in-game revenue from casual gamers.
“It’s not like Riot isn’t being aggressive in trying to sell, they’re just different from Overwatch League,” said Greg Via, global head of sports, esports and entertainment marketing for Gillette, which has a deal with Team SoloMid. “The NBA’s different from the NFL.”
Kennedy said his team’s goal is to follow the 2009 movie “Avatar,” which became the highest-grossing box office hit of all time through sustained popularity rather than a single opening weekend splash.
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