“I am let down by the LEC today,” Indiana ‘Froskurinn’ Black, an LEC caster tweeted shortly afterwards. “There have been many good days to be a member of the LEC team, today is not one of those days,” fellow caster Daniel ‘Drakos’ Drakos tweeted. Other members of the LEC broadcast team, including Andrew ‘Vedius’ Day, Trevor ‘Quickshot’ Henry, Eefje ‘Sjokz’ Depoortere, Aaron ‘Medic’ Chamberlain, Christy ‘Ender’ Frierson and Laure “Bulii” Valée shared similar remarks online that day.

This is disappointing because this is the LEC. It’s my team, my product, my managers, my office.

My family. My home.

This isn’t someone far away in HQ that I don’t know. This is devastating because I know who made these choices and I feel silenced.

— Froskurinn (@Froskurinn) July 29, 2020

Those views were quickly repeated and amplified by LEC viewers on Twitter, Reddit and other social media platforms. Many felt it was egregious for the LEC to tweet about the partnership with a display picture that showed an LGBTQ+ version of its logo. Other esports commentators, including those who work on the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) in North America, echoed the community’s disappointment on Twitter. “My disappointment is immeasurable,” James ‘Dash’ Dash, an LCS caster tweeted. “I adamantly do NOT support this partnership.”

Neom’s development has been controversial. The so-called ‘Mega-City’ was announced by Mohammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, in October 2017. As the Guardian reports, the project requires land that is currently occupied by the Huwaitat tribe. One member, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, was killed by Saudi security forces in April after explaining in a video that he and other tribe members were facing eviction. Saudi Arabia’s state security confirmed his death, according to the BBC, but alleged that he had shot at the country’s security forces, giving them no choice but to exchange fire.

Saudi Arabia has a long history of human rights abuse.

Saudi Arabia has a long history of human rights abuse, too. Homosexuality is illegal in the country and women’s rights are heavily restricted, for instance. In October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist for the Washington Post and critic of the Saudi government, was murdered inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul. As the BBC reports, Saudia Arabia initially denied any knowledge of the killing, but Shalaan al-Shalaan, the country’s deputy public prosecutor, later said the murder had been ordered by the head of a “negotiations team” sent to bring Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia.

Today, members of the LEC commentary team said they were happy with the reversal. Quickshot tweeted: “I’m happy the decision was reversed, but I’m sad it happened in the first place.” He later added: “Trust has been damaged internally and externally and you’ve seen it and experienced it. It will take time to repair, and I ask that if you trust me, trust that I’m doing what I can internally and externally.” Medic wrote in a separate post: “I woke up to good news but still feel dejected. I’m so sorry to LEC fans that this ever happened. It is not what I stand for.”

Trust has been damaged internally and externally and you’ve seen it and experienced it. It will take time to repair, and I ask that if you trust me, trust that I’m doing what I can internally and externally.

It’s been a tough few days. These are not easy challenges. Lots to do.

— Trevor Henry (@Quickshot) July 30, 2020

The LEC was originally called the EU LCS. It was renamed and rebranded in early 2019, though, to further separate its league and image from the North American LCS. That transition has been a huge success and allowed the LEC’s organisers to strike sponsorship deals with a wealth of household brands including Kia and KitKat. Esports have fared better than traditional sports during the COVID-19 pandemic but are still under pressure to reach profitability. Riot has hinted in the past that it needs to increase revenue in order to make its esports business sustainable and avoid cutting costs. Chris Greeley, the Commissioner of the LCS, told the Washington Post that he expects the North American league to turn a profit next year, however.

“We took time this week to look inward and to be thoughtful and deliberate in how Riot can truly help combat racism and injustice. After all, true change starts at home. We have had a long standing commitment to combating this within our games, but we realized that is not enough,” Jadeja wrote in his letter. Riot Games, like many other developers, has to grapple with online games’ notoriously toxic environments, which are usually rife with racism, misogyny and homophobia.

It’s also not the only gaming company that’s donating to causes that support racial equality. Electronic Arts also recently announced that it’s donating $1 million to “organizations dedicated to the fight for racial justice in the US and against discrimination around the world.” Humble also announced a $1 million fund dedicated to helping publish games by black developers.

Riot Games

A new Spike Rush game mode is available in beta, with the intention of offering a more hectic, faster match. A brand new map is available, Ascent, that features a central area teams can control to open up different routes for attackers.

REYNA /// Mexico
“What hope do these criaturas have?”#VALORANT pic.twitter.com/inO8bR5cto

— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) May 30, 2020

Reyna is the first new character Riot’s adding to the game. She’s described as a “big “get frags” agent” who needs to get kills to power up her special abilities. According to one designer “If she doesn’t get kills, though, she’s BAD. Like, near-useless. You’re making a big bet picking Reyna.”

Existing heroes Sage, Omen, Phoenix, Raze and Jett have all had their abilities adjusted as well, hit registration has been updated and performance fixes should help keep framerates steady. Riot has also published a “community code” ahead of launch to lay out how they expect players to treat each other — it will pop up the first time new players log in. For those who break it, they can expect a 72-hour restriction that blocks “all” and “team” chat channels, although party chat will still let them communicate with friends.

To start playing competitive mode matches, you’ll need first to play 20 unrated games. Once you qualify, you’ll be able to queue for competitive play with up to four other players, provided you’re all within two ranks of one another.  

If you’ve played a recent Blizzard game or League of Legends competitively any time in the last couple of years, Valorant‘s ranking system will be familiar. In all, there are eight ranks: Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Immortal and Valorant. Besides the final one, Riot has divided each into a further three tiers.

When you first start working your up the ladder, the game will factor how you play during matches. Your performance will become less of a factor as you move up, to the point where at the Valorant rank winning and how decisive your matches were are the only variables the current system will take into account. The reason for this is that Riot says, “at the highest levels of competitive play, we trust you and your teammates have earned your way there.”

The studio claims it has also designed the system in such a way as to prevent smurfing, a practice wherein high-skill players will create new accounts so they can play against less experienced opponents. The decisiveness factor is there to prevent players from throwing matches, something that can be a major issue in League of Legends.    

Once the Valorant is officially available sometime later this summer, the studio will reset the ladder. In the meantime, you can try to get into the closed beta by watching other people play the game on Twitch.  

Lewis used to be the head of marketing for League of Legends, and she helped enact that game’s Partner Program, which rewards video-focused influencers with in-game perks, developer access, promotional support and the opportunity to participate in reveals. Other AAA studios have similar partnerships with streamers in place, notably Overwatch studio Blizzard. 

With Valorant, Lewis’ marketing strategy has been to leverage Riot’s relationships with streamers and infuse the development process with their feedback from day one. Or, day negative-one.

“Our approach has been even more intimate with influencers,” Lewis said. “‘We need advice on our game, help us make this game good, help us make this live up to your standards as an FPS player.’ It was really crucial to get those influencers involved at an early stage.”

On top of offering early access, free games, networking opportunities and other perks to Valorant streamers, Riot has the cash to make deals with high-profile personalities if and when it wants to. League of Legends generated $1.5 billion in revenue in 2019, and tends to make between $1 and $2 billion a year. Not to mention, Riot is owned 100 percent by China’s largest internet company, Tencent Holdings.

Money aside, Riot is rich in relationships. The studio has been running League of Legends since 2009, it kicked off the game’s esports circuit in 2011, and it started the Partner Program in late 2018. The studio has been building connections with streamers, esports players and influencers for years, and these relationships are paying off with Valorant, the studio’s first new IP in more than a decade.

“The reason we’ve been popular with streamers is that we’re oriented toward getting to know them, having deeper relationships with them, understanding their feedback about the game, playing the game with them,” Lewis said. “We’ve got a lot of our developers out there playing with influencers and just sort of just bear-hugging them and welcoming them in. That was an explicit marketing strategy of ours.”

Valorant’s record-breaking Twitch debut coincides with a general uptick in streaming viewership tied to the global coronavirus pandemic. With country- and state-wide quarantine orders in place around the world, more people than ever are watching Twitch and YouTube videos, and with traditional sports on pause, esports are finding a hungry audience.

Valorant was built to be an esports powerhouse, and Riot has already laid out rudimentary rules for official tournaments. The studio’s esports plans include the addition of a mode that replaces in-game blood with sparks in an attempt to secure squeamish sponsors (and likely to appease strict Chinese censorship laws). 

A handful of professional players and streamers have also announced their intent to play Valorant full-time, ditching other popular titles in the process. Fortnite World Cup runner-up Harrison “psalm” Chang is switching to Valorant, as is Overwatch pro John “Wanted” Lin. Jake “Poach” Brumleve announced in March that he’d be ditching Fortnite for Valorant, and in a Twitlonger statement he criticized Fortnite publisher Epic Games for mismanagement of the game’s esports league, writing,

“I hope I find what I’m looking for in Valorant. I have high hopes for the game and am very motivated to stream and try and compete. If it doesn’t work out, I will move forward as a streamer. I’m excited to be streaming again, I don’t feel boxed in by feeling forced to stream Fortnite anymore.”

This faith in Valorant speaks to the success, so far, of Riot’s streamer-first marketing approach. Lewis actually calls it “player-first.” She says Riot is interested in working with streamers and fans at any popularity level, not just top-tier Twitch personalities. 

“Competition is the main point of Valorant, and so we expect that’ll play out really nicely in the esports scene,” Lewis said. “It’s been really exciting so far talking with team owners, talking to players of other types of games in the competitive scene and just gauging their interest.”

At the beginning of the year, Ludwig “Anomaly” Lagerstedt had a significant YouTube following as a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player, with a small presence on Twitch. Today, he’s regularly the top name on Twitch, streaming Valorant. From April 13th to 19th, Anomaly’s channel clocked 13.85 million hours of eyeballs, and they were all on Riot’s new shooter, according to The Esports Observer.

On April 15th, Riot opened up the Valorant beta program and enabled key drops for anyone streaming the game on Twitch, not just certified partners. The drops are still running 24/7, and today, just over two weeks after the game launched in closed beta, Valorant is still at the top of the Twitch charts.

League of Legends and Valorant developer Riot Games just shared its next big bet. On Thursday, the company said it had acquired Hypixel Studios, the creator of an upcoming role-playing game called Hytale. If you’re not familiar with the game, think Minecraft but with more of a focus on adventuring and combat. 

Riot didn’t disclose the financial terms of the acquisition. However, it doesn’t sound like Riot plans to change too much about how the studio functions. The company says Hypixel will retain its current structure, with plans to open a new office in Northern Ireland that will host additional back-office and quality assurance staff. Riot adds it will share its experience in “developing and publishing acclaimed, player-focused games” with Hypixel.

To enter the closed beta, you’ll need to sign up for a Riot account, link it to Twitch and then watch people stream the game for a chance to get an invite. At the moment, the game is a PC exclusive. But with modest requirements across the board, don’t let that discourage you from trying to get into the closed beta if you’re interested.

To play Valorant at 30 frames per second, Riot says you’ll want a computer with at least an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor and an integrated HD 3000 graphics card. Basically, almost any PC made in the last decade or so should be able to run the game. Playing the game at 60 and 144 frames per second won’t require cutting edge hardware either. At the top end, Riot says a computer with an Intel Core i5 4460 processor, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU and 4GB of RAM will do the trick. That said, even something like a seven-year-old GeForce GT 730 will get you to 60 frames per second.

The closed beta should be a good opportunity for people to see what Valorant is all about and whether it stands out in a crowded field that includes behemoths like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Rainbow Six Siege.

When a League streamer installs the extension, their audience will be able to pull up an interactive panel that displays the match scoreboard, the streamer’s gameplay stats and match history, as well as other information. The interface features four tabs, the most notable of which breaks down the streamer’s champion build (seen above). This part of the extension allows you to see the order the person you’re watching upgraded their skills and runes, as well as what items they bought. One of the nifty features here is that you get to see a timeline of the streamer’s item build, so you can get a sense of when you should aim to acquire certain items. The utility of the tool is that you can glean a lot of useful information about certain aspects of the game without having to wait for the person you’re watching to say something.

At almost any time of day, League of Legends is one of the most popular attractions on Twitch, so it’s easy to see why the company went out of its way to build this tool. With the game slated to make the jump to Android, iOS and consoles later this year, it will probably get a lot of use soon.

Just as the debut LCS tournament was playing out in June 2011, the streaming site Justin.tv launched Twitch, a live-video platform dedicated to gaming. Today, Amazon owns Twitch and streaming is mainstream, with popular personalities regularly commanding multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals. While Twitch has dominated this space for the past half decade, competitors like Mixer and YouTube have recently stepped up and infused the industry with competition, signing exclusivity deals with big streamers and esports leagues, including Overwatch and Call of Duty.

Tyler “Ninja” Blevins ditched Twitch in mid-2019 to stream exclusively on Mixer, Microsoft’s rival streaming service, in a deal reportedly worth up to $30 million. A few months later, Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek made the same move. Before the end of 2019, Jack “CouRage” Dunlop dropped Twitch for YouTube, while Twitch responded by snagging Benjamin “DrLupo” Lupo, Saqib “LIRIK” Zahid and Timothy “TimTheTatman” Betar. Each of these deals are reported to be worth millions of dollars per year.

Every streamer in the previous paragraph is signed with Loaded, a management company that sets up marketing and sponsorship deals between streamers and the companies that want to pay them. Davidson joined Loaded this week as Vice President of Talent, leaving her role as senior esports manager at Riot.

“With social interactions these days becoming more of a digital experience, and people being more interested in new forms of content, it isn’t as much of a surprise to me that streaming has taken off like it has,” Davidson said. “Content creators also have more tools and avenues than ever to attract audiences and brands, while the appetite for content is at an all-time high. It is exciting to be able to help creators develop their careers in this space.”

Loaded isn’t the only thing all of those streamers have in common — they’re also all dudes. Though women compose 46 percent of the US video game market, esports are heavily dominated by men. According to Esports Earnings, the woman who’s won the most prize money in professional gaming is StarCraft II player Sasha “Scarlett” Hostyn, who’s earned $357,339 over eight years. Meanwhile, the site says Dota 2 player Johan “N0tail” Sundstein has won $6,890,592 over nine years. There are 329 male players and millions of dollars between N0tail and Scarlett.

“The appetite for content is at an all-time high.”

Of course, professional gaming isn’t the same as streaming. These industries have grown up together, though not all esports players are streamers, and not all streamers are pros. By design, streaming is an open market, where essentially anyone can dive in and start a channel. Still, the most popular names in streaming are men, and women routinely face gender-based discrimination and harassment on live platforms.

Based on hours watched, the top 10 streamers in 2019 were all men, StreamElements reports. Of the nine biggest streamers today by follower count, only one is female, according to The Loadout. Rank streamers by their subscriber numbers — meaning, people who actually pay to watch — and there are no women in the top 10, the site says.

“Why don’t you use voice chat?”
“Why can’t I find a girlfriend who plays video games?”
“Why do you mute people who ask you if you’re a girl?”

Gee, I dunno.

[Warning: extreme language and monumental stupidity] pic.twitter.com/TO4VzU44YF

— Anne Munition (@AnneMunition) May 23, 2018

Loaded represents 36 gaming content creators. Just five are women: Hannah “Bnans” Kennedy, Eefje “Sjokz” Depoortere, Jessica “Jghosty” Blevins, Jodi “QuarterJade,” and AnneMunition (who prefers not to share her legal name).

“Here at Loaded we’re actively seeking to diversify our portfolio of talent, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s also what’s best for the business and industry,” Davidson said. “Those who are in a position to should be thinking about this and doing what they can to more accurately represent diversity within their ranks and content. In order to accelerate this, leaders in our industry need to support women and other minority groups to create a more inviting and supportive landscape for everyone. It’s something Loaded will be intentional about, and I look forward to playing a big role in our strategy there.”

“We live in a diverse world and that should be celebrated.”

Loaded is one management company that deals with one sliver of the gaming industry, but it holds a lot of sway in 2020. It has the biggest and most lucrative names in streaming, it’s signing deals worth tens of millions of dollars, and it has the power to put new, fresh faces in front of a hungry audience. With Davidson in charge of lining up new talent, expect to see more diversity in Loaded’s roster — and on Twitch, Mixer, YouTube and even Facebook Gaming.

“One of my goals at Loaded is to evolve the kind of support we offer to our talent, which includes deepening our understanding of the services that will really help our talent thrive and become successful long-term,” she said. “We know there are different challenges, needs and opportunities for different talent, so we should have a variety of solutions and offerings to support that diversity.”

Davidson reports directly to Loaded co-founder Brandon Freytag, and she said he’s also committed to broadening the company’s — and the industry’s — streaming portfolio.

“We live in a diverse world, and that should be celebrated and reflected back to audiences,” Davidson said.

The company further argued that statements on its platforms could “escalate” already tense situations, putting fans and Riot staff in danger.

The position isn’t likely to assuage critics. People (including US senators) have already accused Blizzard of caving in to Chinese censorship in order to avoid angering the Communist Party and lose business — Riot’s policy won’t do anything to allay suspicions it’s doing the same. This isn’t helped by Riot’s Chinese ownership. While Tencent has stakes in a number of companies, including Activision Blizzard and political speech defender Epic Games, it has complete ownership of Riot. In theory, Tencent might feel pressured to silence mentions of Hong Kong protests lest it face retaliation at home.

There’s the risk of a backlash as a result. Blizzard faced an almost immediate uproar over its ban, both online and among its own employees. Riot may not have banned anyone as of this writing, but gamers might see it as just a matter of time and object in a similar fashion.