In order to promote a truly professional setting, Riot has issued a new rules of championship contract for pro League of Legends players that bans them from streaming its competitor’s games. This applies to any teams that participate in its League of Legends Championship Series.
This document, obtained by OnGamers, references titles like DOTA 2 and StarCraft, as well as a handful of other games that professionals can’t stream to their thousands of fans. The punishment? Any player who breaks the rules will find themselves and their team ejected from the series. Riot has also come out against streams of a potentially offensive or illegal nature, including pornography, the promotion of gambling, and drug use.
Riot's Whalen Rozelle quickly created a Reddit thread after this contract was discovered to explain his company’s reasoning.
"We say this all the time: we want League of Legends to be a legitimate sport," he writes. "There are some cool things that come from that (salaried professional athletes, legitimate revenue streams, visas, Staples Center), but there's also a lot of structural work that needs to be done to ensure a true professional setting.
"We recognize there may be some differences of opinion in the perception of pro players' streams. In the past, pro gamers only had to worry about their personal brands when streaming and, at most, may have had to worry about not using the wrong brand of keyboard to keep their sponsor happy. Now, however, these guys are professionals contracted to a professional sports league. When they're streaming to 50,000 fans, they're also representing the sport itself.”
The leaked contact can be seen below:
These championships draw huge numbers, and HBO is documenting what’s quickly becoming the most popular video game in the world. It’s a sport, and unfortunately for some pro players, Riot is being a bit stricter about everything surrounding it.
