One can certainly understand why Riot is forcing its pros into their title. This is not the first time the company has been accused of being a tad too aggressive towards its competition but nowadays it makes even more sense for them to act like that: eSports is growing and the market reaches millions (if not billions) of people yearly and securing the lion’s share of the pie today means blooming into a massive business tomorrow. Seeing how the salaried players taking part in your league are also the biggest advocates of your product, contractually obliging with solely promoting said title is not too arrogant of a move, right?
Wrong. Fighting dirty is a natural part of high-stakes business but there should always be a line to be drawn. Riot’s banning of competitor games from their pro players’ streams is not only uncomradely towards other ESPORTS but it’s also offensive towards pro players’ private time. How they control the players within the LCS studio is in their right but reaching a restricting hand outside this area should not be tolerated. It’s an impudent next step to the twisting of hands which started with the elimination of all competition outside LCS and which forced the pros to either play by Riot’s rules or be jobless.
While there’re benefits to be found in the general idea of such controlled and supervised tournament (read our “If LoL can, why can’t others?” editorial on the matter), the company needs to understand there are limits to everything. You can’t be the puppet master of your players forever, at least not in such an intrusive way. Just like you can’t keep playing dirty with the competition as no company is immune to bad image and there’s always a hidden and fatal “Suck my dick”, ready to get you out of business.
Of course all of this would feel a little better, granted that wasn't the image Riot was trying to portray in the firstplace. Bear in mind that although we've seen the various criticisms of our community, we as gamers tend to beslightly less fickle than those who aren't exposed day-in and day-out to the vast informational reserve of the internet. Propaganda that may be praised in the "real world" will tickle the nerves and patience of the skeptical, which undoubtedly will grow viral due to the nature of one voice rampantly spreading over social networks or community gaming hubs such as r/leagueoflegends.
It is then safe to say that Riot could perhaps be making a great decision in the outside world that simply doesn't compliment the desire held by our community due to the marketable differences between sports fans and League fans. Of course, the stark difference there is that associations like NBA and NFL (which are often referenced to compare the contractual work to Riot Games) don't focus on promoting a product like League of Legends does. Riot Games, of course wants you to watch League of Legends just as much as they want you to play the game so that you'll be invested enough to feel RP purchases are worthy of your money.
Herein lies the importance of context -- Of course Riot Games wants to develop the game as a real sport. A quote from Whalen Rozelle attempts to justify their actions here:
"We say this all the time: we want League of Legends to be a legitimate sport. 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.
I can’t stress enough how these guys in the LCS are on the road to being real, legitimate athletes. This is new territory for a lot of teams (especially in esports), because the transition goes from being a group of talented individuals to being real icons of a sport and a league. Similarly, you probably wouldn’t see an NFL player promoting Arena Football or a Nike-sponsored player wearing Reebok on camera. Pro players are free to play whatever games they want – we’re simply asking them to keep in mind that, on-stream, they’re the face of competitive League of Legends."
If League of Legends were a sport broadcasted on TV with similar personalities and demographics, this would be perfectly reasonable. What Riot Games intended to do was pretty smart; they're developing a method to monopolize League of Legends, but doing so subtly. As malicious as it may sound, it's in their rights as a business and by all means they should push their business to be the strongest it can possible be. Again, the issue comes from the image they are trying to put off as "helping eSports as a whole" while simultaneously going with the text-book corporate route. When you say one and do another, your image and intention becomes convoluted and confusing. You can't play pretend with altruism and then aspire to have opposite intentions.
In attempts to artificially bolster LoL as a game through streamers and the ruleset applied by the contracts, Riot have "broken even" at best. While Riot may have less consumers fleeing to opposing titles or sharing their hard-earned cash on up and coming titles such as Hearthstone instead of exclusively purchasing LoL content, they've also received a fair bit of negative press. The leaked contract caused a lot of controversy and doubt in Riot as a company due to morals and ethics that players perceived in a very skewed manner. This is due to the very confusing method in which Riot carries themselves -- constantly in a tug-of-war between the image of altruism and more selfish intentions.
However, it's obviously not so black and white as it never is in business. This brings us into the next conflict -- lack of clarity. It's safe to say most people viewed the contract with a raised brow, with some rather inconsistent choices of banned games in the restricted list. For example, the exclusion of titles like CS:GO or the upcoming Heroes of the Storm while restricting Warhammer Online and Fat Princess is bewildering.
And what about the streamer's and Riot Game's repercussions? Assuming streamers cannot play games while in the gruesome and lengthy queues of solo queue, they must then find alternatives. It is then possible that their image could be misconstrued by devaluing the entertainment value of the game indirectly through the output of entertainment of the streamer. What I mean by this is if a potential LoL playing, LoL watching enthusiast tunes in and sees essentially nothing happening for about the equal duration of a solo queue game, they may find the game and the professional gamers to be boring, correlating that same lack of entertainment to LoL itself.
Another problem is this greatly encourages smurfing, which jumps from one disaster into the next. The most effective way for high-level professional gamers to avoid long queues is to jump into lower-rated games, an endeavor that typically results in a humiliating smash for the opposition. This then indicates to the viewer that Riot is perfectly okay with low level games being essentially ruined.
These are things that a typical sports star does not have to worry about in their career, primarily because a streamer streams in his own time, and in my opinion it should be treated as such. If a NBA player is restricted from NFL, or a Pepsi employee cannot take a sip out of a Coke can, then that's that. There's no repercussions like there are for our professional League players. To put it in perspective, an MLB professional doesn't display his practice outside of the tournament he's competing in (regularly). He doesn't have to worry about his entertainment value inbetween the times of his matches, and he certainly doesn't have to participate in Little League Baseball to avoid waiting in line for professional level exhibition matches.
This is, again, because these rules that are being enforced are taken heavily out of context. As much as we want to instill the image worlwide that League of Legends is a sport, it has very obvious differences that Riot Games needs to respect. Establishing these kind of restrictions as well as the ones Riot allegedly had done in the past (Tieing an organization to only LoL if they choose to compete) simply comes off as greedy and destructive to the current infrastructure and establishment. Despite eSports having been around since the early 90's as of now, we're still in our infancy in comparison to actual physical sport establishments.
Probably the most damaging of potential repercussions is the possible eviction of many new competitive players. Regardless of whether one feels this is a frivolous act on Riot's part or perfectly legitimate, they will end up looking like bad guys from the outside world to a person deciding between titles like LoL in comparison to very open and free practices from Dota 2 from Valve. It's akin to the feel some players had in the recent console wars of Xbox One and Playstation 4, where there simply felt like there was more "freedom" in terms of what you could do with your spare time and the hardware you own. Dota and Dota's esports has a very "grassroots" feel while everything in League of Legends continues to feel more restrained within the pro scene. The difference could very well be a tipping point in a player's decision leaning one way or the other.
At the end of the day, all of this essentially comes down to Riot's foundation, where everything is controlled and regulated by them and they make the vast amount of decisions for the game as an eSport. This is in stark contrast with Dota 2 and other eSports in which the games grew organically. Had Riot chosen the same path, many journalists speculate that it could be even stronger than today while representing what Riot had originally intended it to, and operating on a much more candid basis of freedom.
Contextually speaking, this could have been an excellent decision in the right situation. However, just like how you cannot effectively utilize a scewdriver to hammer in nails, you cannot use NFL and NBA business methods to set the rules for League of Legends eSports. While the current predicament may not be as harmful and invasive as it could be, the more acceptance players have for this kind of behavior means the higher potential of Riot bullying further, because it certainly will not stop here.
Riot has enough of a lead that the risk of coming across as corporate tyrants is not worth the meager and negligible gains from keeping firm grasps on the players and their freedoms. One should not bite the hand that feeds.
UPDATE: After an enormous amount of feedback and backlash from the community, Riot has decided to revoke their streaming restrictions. Riot's very own RedBeard admits that had it not been brought to the public eye, things may not have changed. Either Riot really has a soft spot for player feedback or someone in their PR department is receiving a handsome raise.
