Riot Games, true to their name, has seemingly decided to start a riot, but one with their own fans.
As they explained on Twitter, they have decided to open up gambling, or in their own words, sports betting, for eSports on their games Valorant and Tier 1 of League of Legends.
This is Riot Games’ argument for incorporating gambling into their eSports:
We know sports betting isn’t for everyone, and that some fans have strong feelings about it, and we respect that. However, the reality is that betting activity already exists around our sports and will continue whether we engage with it or not.
Historically, this has been a restricted sponsorship category, and Riot has not engaged with betting companies. Teams have asked us to reconsider our stance, and after years of analysis to ensure we got it right, we agreed it was time to open up this category to create more revenue opportunities for teams.
Riot went on to explain that last year alone, total betting turnover on these games reached $ 10.7 billion. But because all of this betting happens on unregulated markets, the Valorant and League of Legends who bet on their favorite eSports teams are doing so unprotected.
So, basically, Riot claims they primarily received the request to finally incorporate gambling from the eSports teams playing their games. It’s easy to see that they want to get sponsorships from the considerably bigger pool of companies and organizations as a result of this. But Riot Games also has a point that keeping betting unregulated means that the companies and organizations that are running Valorant and League of Legends gambling are free to do whatever they want. There are levels where this is consumer protection, and also managing of their own reputation.
It remains to be seen how well this would work out, but the fact that Riot Games opened this Pandora’s Box alone is certain to wreck the eSports world. We can already see, for example, SNK being interested if adding gambling could raise interest in eSports for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves.
There is, of course, already a lot of unregulated and/or poorly regulated gaming activity across several games and gaming communities. There are definitely situations where the best thing for a game franchise is to distance themselves from its supposed hardcore community, but the dilemma always arises if they could take charge and make such communities safe for everyone.
While all of this could turn out very badly, some of the things Riot promised – such as committing to no ads on official broadcasts – are already protections they could not make otherwise for gamblers in unregulated networks. So there’s promise to Riot Games taking this direction, but that’s only if they stick the landing.
