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Riot: How one company wants to turn eSports into the most popular pro sport in the world

This is Part 3 of our five-part series on League of Legends and the future of eSports. Read Part 1, on the growth of the game and the appeal of LoL, or Part 2, on Faker, the enigmatic star of the game.

NEW YORK — Whalen Rozelle walked through the guts of Madison Square Garden, striding purposefully through the cinderblock-walled tunnels that led out from the locker rooms down to the main floor. He smiled at the security guard, who waved him through. Above him, the calls of 15,000 people rang out, and then he stepped out into the light.

He looked up at the crowd and smiled wide. “Not bad, huh?” he said.

Rozelle is the Director of eSports at Riot Games, the man overseeing the development of the League of Legends pro circuit and its quest to become the next major worldwide viewing sensation. Others at Riot build the video games, but it is Rozelle’s job to bring them into our homes. At the League of Legends World Championship semifinals, held in New York City on a Friday night in October, he had the look of a man who had built something sturdy and grand.

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Rozelle is handsome, with a strong jaw and bright eyes. He smiles nearly in perpetuity, and speaks in the upbeat optimistic tech speak you instantly recognize if you’ve spent more than a few days in Silicon Valley. (He graduated from Stanford in 2005 and worked as a financial analyst at Google before entering the eSports world.) He is the man charged with growing League of Legends into something that will appeal to a broad, mainstream audience, and he speaks with the fervor of a born-again.

When he talks about his dreams for League and eSports, Rozelle won’t settle for the easy goals, finding success as a niche sport. He draws connections to the NBA, the NFL. He also has his eye on soccer, the global game.

“Soccer is aspirational for us in terms of league structure. Look at the World Championships,” he said, gesturing up to the crowd cheering above him. “The format of the World Championships will be very familiar to you because it’s the same as the World Cup. We aspire for this to be our World Cup.”

It’s easy to get sucked up into the spell of Rozelle, to buy into the optimism. Sitting on the floor of Madison Square Garden, his turf, looking up at the 15,000 fans cheering the names of these players as SK Telecom T1 wins a pivotal fourth game to force a deciding Game 5 against Rox Tigers, it’s all spellbinding. It’s beautiful. You feel a part of something. Walking out onto the floor with Rozelle, I’m reminded of the scene in Almost Famous where the young William follows the band Stillwater out onto the stage and hears them rip that first chord of “Fever Dog.” It was all happening.

To understand the business side of League of Legends, and eSports in general, it helps to understand how the entire thing is set up. Riot Games is the maker of the video game League of Legends. It is also the organizing body behind the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS), a professional league run by the company’s eSports division. The eSports division is at once the league’s organizer but also the production company that stages it — booking venues, designing lights and A/V and music, selling merchandise, etc. It organizes the World Championships, the season-ending annual tournament, as well, which I was then watching right there along with 15,000 of my new gaming friends.

On top of building the game, and organizing the events, and running the production, Riot is also now a media company. They produce and stream these matches worldwide to millions of viewers. With a sport that features ten players playing across a broad map, they must direct coverage of the action, which part of the map to highlight, and which lane to cut to, all either live or on a short delay.

To accomplish this, they’ve turned to established sports for guidance.

“I’m from the Bay Area. I love the Giants, the Niners, the Warriors. A lot of us grew up watching traditional sports but were also gamers,” said Rozelle. “We knew that we could improve the broadcast, but how do we do that? So we ended up bringing in people who had done traditional sports broadcasts. … These are guys who had experience doing the Olympics, NBC Sports coverage, some NFL, and they had covered some gaming events.”

They surrounded these established pros with diehard gamers who knew what the fans were looking for, and like that, on the fly, the pro league became the broadcaster of itself.

Riot, in essence, is not only the builder of the game but its commissioner and broadcaster. For League of Legends, one of the most popular video games on earth, the company is James Naismith, Adam Silver and ESPN, all rolled into one.

Riot is making money off this game. Lots of money. The company, which is now owned by Chinese holding company Tencent, had an estimated revenue of $1.6 billion in 2015. It makes this money off of microtransactions, small fees paid by players to upgrade equipment or play as new characters. In January 2014, there were an estimated 27 million people playing the game daily, and even if those people are spending just a few bucks here and there, the numbers add up quickly.

What isn’t clear is how much money the eSports division is making. While the World Championships did have sponsors (electronics company Acer had its name slapped all over everything at the semifinals) almost all LoL broadcasts are streamed completely free online. You can see the strategy — with the video game itself making so much money via microtransactions, eSports is free to sacrifice revenue in pursuit of the largest audience possible.

Riot provides a baseline salary to each team that is meant to be distributed to the players. Any additional salary is left up to the individual teams, who are responsible for building rosters that can compete at the top level. As far as the players’ contracts, well, it gets thorny. Riot both is and isn’t involved in them.

“We do see parts of the contract,” said Rozelle. “But we do need to respect the fact that these are pro teams that are running a business. We do get to see contracts in the case of disputes, but not for our own perusal.”

When pressed on this — how can Riot monitor the players’ contracts if they aren’t seeing the contracts? — Rozelle again had an answer.

“We do work with teams to get a baseline understanding of the contracts, because we do have certain restrictions on contracts. For example, contracts can’t be longer than three years,” he said. “Essentially what we’re trying to do is put in guidelines to help regulate the scene. When we came in we saw contracts that would last two weeks. Or they’d stagger their contracts to end right when the season ends so you wouldn’t have as many options to play. We really worked to introduce rules that would clean a lot of that stuff up.”

Riot also introduced an age minimum for pros, saying players must be 17 years old to sign a professional contract. Teams have limits on roster size — five starters and five reserves — so that one or two teams don’t just buy up all the world’s most talented players. The contract and roster limits make sense. It isn’t in the best interest of LCS for one team to have 30 of the world’s best players, much like it isn’t in the best interest of Riot’s PR department to have one of its premiere teams scoop up a talented 13-year-old kid and sign him/her to a 15-year deal at some ridiculously cheap price.

“We’ve seen someone try to sign someone to a ten-year contract and we said, ‘No, this isn’t going to happen,’ ” said Rozelle, who is one of the few people I’ve ever met with the ability to speak in complete, coherent paragraphs. “And again, as this thing develops, is three years the right maximum term? I don’t know. It’s the right decision and ruling at the time, and like any sport that is growing rapidly, we just have to stay flexible and understand that things might change over the course of the next coming years. And we have to be flexible and willing to change ourselves as needed.”

That flexibility to change and adapt, so prized in the tech world, gets a little hairy when you realize that people’s lives are at stake here. These are teenagers signing contracts to play a game in front of millions of people. There is no collective bargaining agreement, as there is no players’ union.

Rozelle does speak at length about making sure the game is acting in the best interest of the players, who often become pros as teenagers, forsaking college to chase their dream of playing League for a living. Teams often have these young men — and yes, they’re mostly men, though there are some rising women stars in the game — live in group houses, sleeping, eating, and training together every day of the week. The players seem to love it (who wouldn’t want to hang with their buds playing games all day?), and teams have noticed that even when they try to get some separation between the team and the players’ personal lives, the group usually just ends up living together and playing all day anyway.

But all this leads to the unbelievably rapid rate of burnout for many of the world’s top players. It is common for players to retire at age 23, fried after years spent staring at a screen and drowning in Monster Energy drink. Is this the natural way this sport will work? Like gymnastics, will these players forever enter the game as teenagers and exit by their 24th birthday? Or have they gotten something horribly wrong here?

For his part, Rozelle addresses all these questions with confidence, as if the answers are the most obvious thing in the world.

“So there’s a great deal of independence that we want teams to have,” he said. “They’re their own businesses and we want to give them the ability to innovate on their own. That said, we absolutely work with teams and the pros themselves to understand, you know, what are the issues facing pros in terms of health — mental health, physical health — how can we build out the brand of the pros, how can we help them get coached when they’re thinking about career opportunities after playing?

“We have a team called the player management team, which is an internal team at Riot, that is essentially tasked with really improving the lives of the pros, making sure that they have a great experience in the LCS and at the various venues, and also being advocates internally when we make decisions, making sure that we always keep the professional player in mind as well as the eSports fan itself.”

When Rozelle says it, it seems totally natural and normal. But with more than two seconds of thought you get to a lot of serious questions, such as: Why does Riot get to determine the length of these contracts? If a business’ first (and one would argue only) commitment is to its profit, does it really care what happens to these kids? Is anyone talking to these kids about college? Is it condescending to do that, to assume one knows better than they do? Why aren’t the salaries public? If Riot Games is putting on this league and limiting the length of these contracts, why are they not also finding out the dollar amounts inside of them?

This is the thing about setting up a pro sports league: Eventually you’re going to have to start dealing with all the stuff that pro sports leagues deal with.

Here’s Rozelle on agents:

“I think some players have agents. The money is starting to get big enough that, for certain players, agents do make sense. And we think that that’s a positive thing.”

On players being bought and sold between teams:

“So essentially, it depends on the contract. … But it’s cool to have contracts traded back and forth and purchased. I know that there is a Chinese player named Uzi who is an incredibly popular [player] in China, and his contract was transferred for millions of dollars. It’s pretty cool to see that ecosystem develop.”

And drug testing:

“To date, we haven’t seen a ton of evidence that a lot of stuff is going on. But if we do, absolutely we’ll address the problem, as competitive integrity is so important to us, as well as the health of the pro.”

The drug testing concern is a real one, by the way. These matches can last up to five hours, and with the focus needed to play at the top level, it’s easy to see the advantage in using Adderall or other amphetamines to maintain an edge. After a CS:GO tournament in 2015, a pro player came out and admitted “we were all on Adderall” to a reporter, setting off a brief firestorm within the eSports community and getting mainstream attention from media outlets.

Contract issues and drug concerns aside, Rozelle almost seems giddy with the prospect of the sport’s growth. They’re working to tackle issues, sure, and Rozelle and his colleagues are also getting to create a pro sports league, something most of us could only dream of. They have their own version of the World Cup. They get to pick and choose the elements they love from other sports at their discretion. Grabbing again from European soccer, the LCS has introduced promotion and relegation — allowing teams in the North American Challenger League to enter tournaments twice a year with the bottom-performing teams in the LCS.

They’re also now seeing collegiate programs pop up — UC Irvine is now offering gaming scholarships — though Rozelle does admit that most of the top players in the world are already signed to pro teams by the time they hit college age.

Perhaps the only thing slowing League down is the high barrier of entry for a casual fan. (I’ve now played the game several times, spent a weekend watching the best players in the world play, and still only am scratching the surface at understanding what’s going on while watching.) Then again, if a nation can come together and understand the infield fly rule, perhaps they too can understand why it was so daring for the ROX Tigers to employ a Miss Fortune support in the second and third game of the World Championship semifinals.

There are questions. Many questions. But Rozelle is confident that he can answer them, and that League of Legends has a shot to be something grand, a sport for the world.

“This is a sport that’s super new. We started a pro weekly competition just in 2013,” said Rozelle, during that pivotal fourth game of the semifinals, before drifting off mid-thought and focusing on the play on the giant screen above him.

“… Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to watch for a second there. I’m a fan.”

Correction: The article originally said that Riot Games does not pay players. The company provides a stipend to each team to distribute as salary.

READ PART I: ON THE APPEAL OF LEAGUE OF LEGENDS

READ PART II: ON FAKER, THE PHENOM TASKED WITH BRINGING LEAGUE TO THE MAINSTREAM

TOMORROW WILL BE PART IV, ON THE BUDDING COACHING PROFESSION IN ESPORTS

Source: For The Win