Riot Games' Major League Baseball deal will only affect "pro" leagues – not UK or amateur League of Legends tournaments

Riot Games is working on a new streaming app which will allow you to watch League of Legends esports content – but don’t expect to see any UK matches on it.
Riot confirmed the rumoured deal with BAMTech today (as first revealed by Richard Lewis last month).
The deal – which promises to net Riot at least $50m a year in revenues and runs until 2023 – is centered predominantly around streaming, sponsorship and advertising.
In a nutshell, BAMTech will be selling advertising space and sponsorship deals to advertisers. It will also handle which content appears elsewhere, such as on Twitch.
A Riot Games spokesperson confirmed to Esports News UK that the deal and app “is only affecting pro leagues”, which includes the likes of the LCS, Challenger Series and Worlds.
It will not include competitive UK League of Legends matches such as those from the ESL UK Premiership, Multiplay Insomnia and UK Masters. Those will likely continue to be broadcast via tournament holders own channels, for example the ESL UK and UK Masters Twitch channels.
For such a big deal, it’s a shame that lower-tier levels of competitive play will not receive any promotion via the app. It seems that Riot and BAMTech are going after advertisers for leagues which are more well-known across the globe.
 

“For such a big deal, it’s a shame that lower-tier levels of competitive play will not receive any promotion via the app. It seems that Riot and BAMTech are going after advertisers for leagues which are more well-known across the globe.”

 
Riot co-founder Marc Merrill (aka Tryndamere) also confirmed on Twitter that the deal is “ad sales exclusive, not platform exclusive”, meaning top-level matches will still be streamed on platforms like Twitch and YouTube.
Riot has said the app and deal will keep ‘the core esports experience as accessible as possible and free without paywall’. The app will be for smartphones and PC.
The developer has made other changes to its leagues, after pro teams penned a letter to Riot outlining their concerns (one of which was the commercial sustainability of being a team in the LCS).
The Worlds prize pool rose above $4m this year, after Riot added a percentage of sales generated through in-game items to the pool.
And from next year, every North American LCS team will be guaranteed a minimum of $50,000 of new digital product revenue per split (in addition to their existing revenue from team icons).
BAMTech (a third of which is owned by Disney) is a division of Major League Baseball’s streaming and tech-focused Advanced Media arm.
There’s more info plus a video interview with Riot and BamTech in this Yahoo post.
 
Image source: Riot Flickr

Dom Sacco

Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.

As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.