Riot Games Talking With Olympics After LOL Esports Breaks Viewership Record

We may soon see Riot Games titles in the Olympics. This comes after the organization confirmed it had been having ongoing conversations with Olympic committee leaders about potentially making League of Legends a medal event in multi-sport event series (like the Olympics). According to Naz Aletaha, the global head of LoL Esports, Riot has had discussions with Olympic leaders as the company attempts to expand in the future.

“We are excited to see esports continue to gain more mainstream momentum and recognition,” Aletaha told Dexerto via a spokesperson, “The inclusion of League of Legends as a medal event in the 2022 Asian Games is a major development for the region and furthers the potential for participation in future multi-sport opportunities.”

This news comes on the heels of the recent League of Legends World Championship tournament, which saw a record number of viewers. In fact, Esports Charts said that the final matchup between Edward Gaming and DWG KIA hit a peak of 4 million viewers. Esports Charts also revealed that this number did not include viewership data from Chinese platforms.

Bilibili did actually have the viewership statistics for the Chinese market when it came to the 2021 LWC Finals. According to Bilibili, roughly 500 million people were watching the event at the same time in China. This cumulative number represents a 20% increase in the amount of live-stream viewers year-over-year.

The Profit‘s Take:

This feels like the first time we’ve seen a major esport/publisher CONFIRM that they are talking to the Olympics. The viewership numbers were so large, you could almost question if Riot Games even NEEDS the Olympics to be successful. Viewership growth has been relatively flat for Worlds over the last three years, which is why I bring into question the accuracy of Bilibili’s viewership data. That number is so large, it almost makes me have doubts about the information they’re reporting. I don’t know if there were any people outside of China who streamed worlds on Bilibili. If we’re comparing sports, the NBA Finals audience was basically the same size as the LWC audience outside of China. China doesn’t have another major national sport, so it’s possible that the viewership number may actually be real. The fact that we’re debating the validity of the number of Chinese viewers is somewhat problematic. Nobody I spoke with had 100% confidence in the Chinese viewership numbers being reported. This creates its own set of problems. I don’t know how you sell this if you can’t have confidence in the reported viewership numbers. This could potentially hurt the marketability and growth of other esports in the future. The audience outside of China is encouraging though. You just hope to see explosive growth instead of slow, minimal growth each year.

(All information was provided by Dexerto, Pandaily, and Upcomer)