Riot Games published a notice of “rejecting” the LPL area
For each League of Legends tournament, organizing broadcasting and companion programs is indispensable. This is essential for LoL audience to watch and understand the tournament as easily and fully as possible. Even with the world's leading tournaments such as LPL or LCK, Riot Games also brought to the English commentary channel to serve the global audience next to the broadcasting sessions in Chinese or Korean for the regional audience.
English comment channels are extremely effective ways to connect tournaments like LCK, LPL to international audiences
However, in the latest announcement of Riot Games, they showed the intention to remove the English LPL comment channel and transfer the tournament to the co-streamer. The Riot Games side will provide the “Clean Feed” channel for these Co-Streamer so they can discuss the battle in the most comfortable way without being affected by the official channel. This means that the English LPL comment channel is officially organized by Riot Games will no longer work.
Riot recently announced that the LPL broadcast in the 2025 season will switch to Co-Streaming mode and no official comment channel
The audience “intestines” stoned fiercely Riot Games's decisive
Immediately after the above notice was given, it received countless “bricks” from the international League of Legends community. Even long -term BLVs of the English LPL channel (Heymuncables or Mazel) or the long -standing characters with League of Legends such as Papasmithy also criticized this decision. They think that Riot Games's actions are simply to cut the cost as much as possible, but never help the LPL monitoring experience are a bit better.
BLV Heymunchables frustratedly shared: “BLV International Tier1 is looking for a job here. I am ready to comment on anything to make money from video games, cooperative events, birthday parties …”
BLV Mazel was also disappointed: “After 4 years of hard struggle, I stood here and realized that my love for the LPL LLP tournament could not save anything.”
The president of the Flyquest Organization – Papasmithy shared: “The first time I was paid to comment was at LPL Summer 2023 and working for Riot Games. It was really too frustrated when 12 years later, this is what we get when it broadcast LPL.”
“It is hard to believe that you try to say that this is a decision for the community. It is simply cutting costs. What is worse than a greedy company is a greedy and dishonest company” – an angry audience shared
In recent years, many famous BLVs have spoken out about Riot Games discriminating against the LPL area, at least in the comment. Many BLVs have high expertise and enthusiasm with League of Legends not chosen by Riot to attend major tournaments like MSI or Worlds just because they work at LPL channel. Some people like BLV Dagda and Hysterics had to switch to LEC to have a better opportunity despite many matches at LEC for a much lower quality than LPL.
BLV Dagda and Hysterics have to switch to Lec Studio to be able to be chosen to work at Worlds
These discrimination moves combined with the announcement of “abandoning” the above English LPL channel make Riot Games receive many criticisms. Of course, from the perspective of Riot Games, they also need to save costs in the current difficult period. However, the removal of such English LPL channel will make the experience of watching the tournament of the audience a lot. Hopefully Riot Games will be able to find another more appropriate solution in the future to avoid this bad condition.