-This is MissZammer. -This is SummerGypsy.
-My name is EzekielChaos. -SparklyPancakes.
TaylorSwift.
-I play Top. -And I play Jungle these days.
-I like to support as Teemo. -I fight for Demacia.
Oh, yeah, we're playing LoL .
I was like, "What's LoL ?" He's like, "Laugh Out Loud?"
I was like, "No, fool! That's League of Legends !"
Holy crud, did this suck us in and get us connected. (480p & 720p Movies Downlod | Mkvking.com)
-We're raging at each other. [laughs] -We're raging. We're laughing.
[man 1] League is something that is not as much of a game,
but more of a place where we can be ourselves
and enjoy what we do and who we do it with.
[man 1] You guys ready?
-[man 2] Yeah. -[woman 1] Yup.
-[man 3] Queue it. -[man 1] Let's do it.
-[man 1] Here we go . -[chimes]
-[man 1] All right we're queuing up. -[keys clacking]
GLHF, everybody.
(480p & 720p Movies Downlod | Mkvking.com)
[upbeat music playing]
-[keys clacking] -[indistinct dialogue]
-I wasn't ready. -I can do it.
We got to gank real quick.
[man] There's always been that parent to child stigma
of whatever you don't understand is obviously not valuable.
A lot of parents or society saw people as being antisocial.
"Hey, this kid is holed up in his room playing games
and it's totally ruining society."
-[crowd cheering] -[upbeat music playing]
[woman] I don't think gaming is as niche and isolated
as a lot of people think it is.
There are these really strong human stories.
He started playing and I found out he liked me.
We've only known each other about a year.
Give or take.
Give or take and we're just like brothers, so... [clicks tongue]
[upbeat music playing]
[crowd cheering]
The game is all done through the word of mouth.
85 percent of the people who come is through a friend.
[crowd cheering]
League of Legends has over 100 million players actively playing every month.
That's over one percent of people on Earth.
The nerds are coming together. We will dominate this world.
[man] Competition and player versus player engagement
is as old as video games have been around.
-We don't get that competitive. -Not a single one of us is competitive.
We swear.
[man] It's a giant guerilla warfare scenario
and only the smartest, strongest and best players come out alive.
-[caster 1] He got it! -[caster 2] Oh, my God, he wins the game!
[female reporter] The finals drew in 36 million.
That's more than the Stanley Cup Finals,
the World Series and the NBA finals combined.
[theme music playing]
[gamer 1] I've been playing games my whole life.
I started playing PC games when I was about seven years old
and I thought it was like a magic puzzle.
It just felt like a whole new world opening up
because I had a huge passion for games like Dungeons & Dragons
and role-playing games in general.
[gamer 2] The most powerful game experience that I ever had,
even to this day,
was in a text based multi-user game called Dragon Realms .
You could sort of boot up the computer, log in,
and be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people
from all around the world simultaneously logged in,
living out adventures in a world with seemingly limitless possibilities.
[gamer 1] My parents were pretty anti -game.
They were big on academics and sports.
So we had pretty strict rules in the house.
[gamer 2] For me, it was a bit of an escape.
I wasn't the best student and when I was really into games,
it became a huge source of conflict and clashing.
[CNBC anchor] Let's take a look at League of Legends ,
it is one of the most popular video games out there.
It is raking in billions in revenue.
Riot Games is the company behind it
and today the company is front and center on the cover of Inc. magazine.
Joining us now for a CNBC Power Lunch exclusive
are Riot Games co-founders Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill.
Brandon and Marc, welcome. Good to have you both here.
I think one of the great delicious ironies here
and either one of you can pick up on this
is that neither of your parents were all that thrilled
at the amount of time you spent gaming as young guys.
What are you-- What do they say now? How do you like me now?
Yeah, exactly. You know, uh,
actually my first Nintendo was something that I won
at my first grade school raffle
because my parents were so anti-video games
and so, you know, we'd sort of think about it.
It was fate, couldn't keep us away.
[Beck] Marc and I met at a summer program
right before college. I was younger than him.
So I was one of the young kids in the program.
I was like, 16.
I think he was 17 or 18, he was about to go to USC.
And I'm like, "Oh, you're from L .A. Oh, cool, well, me too."
And "Oh, you like video games," and we instantly sort of hit it off.
[Beck] Marc had this dichotomy of like, an Eagle Scout
who was captain of the football team
and crushing it in school and like, tabletop D&D nerd.
[Merrill] Brandon was a business major and the consummate business guy,
even from a really young age, he was just really thoughtful about opportunities.
[Beck] Marc and I were playing tons and tons of games.
[Merrill] We're playing the heck out of Counter-Strike and Starcraft
and World of Warcraft at the time were sort of our main games.
But, ultimately, our favorite game at the time was DOTA .
[man] DOTA was a custom mod for Warcraft 3 .
When Blizzard shipped Warcraft 3 they shipped it with a map editor
and people would use the map editor
to make different scenarios that you could play on.
[Merrill] It really pioneered a new sub-genre of real time strategy games
by focusing on one particular unit that was really powerful and interesting
and then working with a team of other people.
[voice in game] It's come to this!
Five players was really a lot of coordination.
That was really fun and exciting.
[Mescon] But it loaded really slow.
And there was a strong lack of matchmaking,
so you could be playing
with someone who was ten times better than you were.
[voice in game] First blood!
You had to kind of beat your head against the wall at every step
from hearing about the game to getting the installation done
to downloading the map to getting into the game for the first time.
[Merrill] Even though it left a lot to be desired from a service standpoint,
DOTA demonstrated that games as a service
was something that could work.
[keys clacking]
[Beck] We felt like a lot of game companies
weren't really focused on gamers like us.
We don't want to buy a box, play a game and be done 30 hours later.
If the online multiplayer arena of the game was compelling enough,
we want to spend hundreds of hours in it, thousands of hours in it.
We wanted to compete as part of a community over and over again.
[Merrill] We then started to ask,
"What does the future game company look like?"
And how can we potentially build that?
We spent nine months putting together a plan,
trying to talk ourselves out of it, really.
[Beck] We wanted to build a company that unapologetically embraced
the hardcore gamers that might be considered niche
or a small slice of the audience.
We had a feeling that this isn't a particularly small niche
and there is a lot of us and there is a lot of pain points
that we could solve as a company
that really cared about that type of player experience.
[Beck] So Marc and I pulled the trigger
and we started Riot Games in 2006 in West Los Angeles.
[Mescon] It's like the gaming company version
of like, The Mighty Ducks.
We were in this tiny office with this stained floor
and we had one conference room and the ceiling leaked.
[man] I guess from the investor perspective
it would have been described as "capital efficient," which, you know,
I think that in the common vernacular that means "shitty."
We essentially had some really passionate, really smart, really inexperienced interns
and a couple of industry vets, who hadn't had a lot of career success.
[Beck] We had to learn everything we didn't know
and do it with a very young team
and we were really nervous because it was months before we had a big demo
and key milestone for the company.
Marc and Brandon demoed the game to me
on the street in San Francisco.
He put the laptop on a newsstand and we proceed to play
this really crude tech demo, like the game play.
And I saw the game and I just thought, "Oh, God, what have I gotten myself into."
That map is awful.
It was like the-- It was so terrible, so cheesy looking.
[Snow] It was clunky. The interface was really bad.
The art was really bad.
But they'd managed to do more in three months
than some of these other companies that were paying stupid sums of money.
And I was just like, "Wow! This is actually pretty compelling."
It was so ambitious. The amount of software
that they wanted to write was crazy.
We built matchmaking. We built your inventory, champ select.
We were building everything outside of the game.
[man] The engine was an absolute mess.
It barely ran. You know, you can't expect that much
of a company that's never shipped a game,
with a President and CEO that have never shipped a game.
There was a lot of pressure. We have one shot at this.
The real problem to solve is you have to make a game that's fun,
that all these people that love DOTA and love Warcraft
and love strategy and love hardcore games, are going to want to play.
[Jew] The game was about characters.
We basically scoured pop culture and built mood boards of awesome art
and things that captured powerful archetypes
from history and from folk tales and from fables.
We took the ones that we thought were the most compelling
and kind of added our kind of pop fantasy spin to them
to bring them to life and to show a face to them
players have never seen before.
They'll be tattooed and badass and they're kind of renegades.
And so, we needed to make 40 champions in a year and a half.
And make sure that we covered a wide cast
so that any player that came in could say like,
"That one's awesome, I wanna play that one,"
then have a good time. That was the goal.
[clicks]
[game voice-over] Welcome to Summoner's Rift.
League of Legends is a five -on-five game that's played across 20 to 45 minutes.
In it, you cooperate with your team of four other players
to try to storm the base of your opponent's
and destroy it before they storm your base and destroy you.
One of the closest sports analogies for League of Legends is basketball.
There's a map in League of Legends called Summoner's Rift,
and that map is the same every single time much like a basketball court.
As far as the game play elements go,
you get to pick what type of thing you want to be going in.
In basketball you have point guards,
centers, power forwards, forwards, shooting guards.
At this point, League of Legends has 137 different things on the roster.
So the amount of different things you can play as is really big.
You're in this fantastic, magical world, and you need to divide and conquer.
What draws players in and drives that process of mastery
is the fact that you are so connected
to that character that a tiny, tiny mistake
can result in a massive defeat or a huge victory.
Once you kill the other team's base, which is called the Nexus, you win.
-[explosion] -[game voice-over] Victory!
I remember the first time we wanted to show
anyone outside the company League of Legends
and we weren't sure if it sucked or not.
[birds chirping]
[Mescon] When you're building a community,
you really have to start with the individuals.
And so, I think day one was, let's start establishing
personal relationships with the 200 people
that are going to be the first people who get into this thing.
Riot Games is here at PAX really to interact with the community one on one.
You know we have a huge focus on the community as a company
and so we love talking to the users, having them,
you know, sit down and play the game, getting their feedback live
and really trying to also promote the game and expose a lot of people
who have never heard of the kind of MOBA genre
or "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena" genre,
which League of Legends has really helped to pioneer.
It handles a lot like DOTA , coming from years of DOTA experience.
This looks like it's actually
not going to be just a mini -game, you know.
It's an actual, like, solid game, you know.
[man] I was not expecting to enjoy it this much.
I'm generally not very good at multi-player games
and there's something like a three-hour wait to get in a game right now.
[commentator] Sivir, an ally of Tarakey on the blue team, just got killed
and now Morgana is up there all by herself.
She could get sniped herself if she's not careful.
The Frost Phoenix is up there, it could slow her down and kill her.
Yeah, I got my beta key already. Downloaded it last night.
I played it last night, too. [chuckles]
Can't get enough, yeah, man.
[clicks]
[Beck] We had gone three years without making any revenue,
just spending other people's money.
Then, we had the audacity to not sell our game
and to make it available for free.
[Merrill] Free games had a huge stigma in the late 2000s,
because the only games that were available
that were free were really old games from Asia.
[shrieks]
[man] MapleStory was the first free-to-play game in North America.
When I first brought MapleStory out here,
a lot of the business was going towards console.
So, I kind of went on a path to being an evangelist
for online gaming and for free-to-play.
Because, not only was online gaming very strange,
free-to-play was extremely strange and the PC,
supposedly as a platform, was dying.
Traditionally, people buy stuff.
But the one thing that free -to-play really addresses
is that it's free-to-play.
So a lot of kids would start playing these games
because there wasn't a hurdle for them to play.
But, free-to-play kind of has this reputation
of being a little bit scammy
and tricking you to do these things or there's going to be another player
that buys power who's going to basically overpower you with their wallet.
Then, out of nowhere came Riot Games
and they used free-to-play kind of in the right way.
[Snow] I'll never forget this.
We're in this meeting and we're talking about Annie,
how she's all built with fire,
and we're talking about Blue Annie, and she would use frost.
Maybe Frost Annie would have like a slower attack rate
but a little bit more damage rate, and we'd sell that.
You see Steve Feak kind of sitting there a little down about it,
and Brandon says, "Steve, you haven't said anything.
What do you think?" Steve looks up and he's like,
"I don't like it, but I'm having a hard time saying why."
And Brandon says, "Does it-- Does it feel bad?"
And Steve's like, "Yeah, it just feels bad."
[man] So, we decided early on that we wouldn't sell power.
We didn't want the person with the most money to win the game.
People said, "Oh, man, we're giving up
assuredly making $100 million on this game
in order to try this experiment where we don't know how much we'll make."
There are ways that people do spend money, they engage deeper with our content.
We offer a series of champions on a free rotation,
so several of them will be free.
Those champions rotate every couple of weeks.
Some players use the free champions as part of their repertoire in a game.
For others, they'll buy the ones that they like the most.
And they will spend our in-game digital currency called Riot Points.
One of the other big items that we sell in the game are skins.
Skins are a uniform.
[man] Because the game is free,
because people get so much value out of it,
our players are like, "Yeah, I'll pay for that skin.
It's kind of a silly idea, but I'm more than happy to pay for an outfit.
I'll spend my five, ten dollars, whatever,
because I had a thousand hours of fun in this game."
[Enock] About a week before we got to the launch date,
people came into the game and tried out the store
and the store immediately fell over.
Literally we get 500 people in,
as we're scaling up to a couple thousand in a scale test, store falls over.
We're sitting there and watching the public chat channel
and one guy had gotten through the store and had bought Cho -Gath.
[character laughs]
And he was like, "No worries, guys, I got my man Cho.
It's all good." [chuckles]
It was like one guy out of like 5,000 or something,
and I was like, "Oh, this is bad. This is really bad."
There was no store in the game. There was no way to make money.
We would be paying all the infrastructure costs
and having all the players in the game,
but without a way for them to unlock any content.
And so that was when we decided, let's think through this as players.
If we were a player, what would we want to happen to us?
And so as gamers we decided, let's make everything free.
[Snow] We called it a launch party like, "Hey, we've launched!"
When in the background you had like half the company
trying to build a store.
And after locking ourselves in a room for, you know,
110 hours a week for about six weeks, uh, we ended up shipping the store.
[Snow] We brought the system down November 18th
and we brought it back up November 19th.
This right here is Riot Games history.
But we're like, staring at the screen and it's blank for like two minutes.
And then lo and behold this little blip shows up for five bucks.
[all cheering]
And so we're like, "It works, it works. It totally works!"
And that was the launch of League of Legends .
-[chanting] -[woman groans]
[Beck] League was not an instant success.
It wasn't like we launched the game
and then suddenly our numbers went through the roof.
It was marginally bigger than the day before,
and the next day was just marginally bigger than the prior day.
To tell you the truth, when I first saw this game,
I thought it was lame. I thought it was boring.
I looked at the game and it didn't really appeal to me.
After the three hour download and patching,
we got onto League and he was like, "Dude, just play it,"
and I begrudgingly agreed.
There's kind of this saying in game dev that
the game developers are the best at the games
until about a week after it gets released to the players.
Once you reach just so many people, they quickly are the ones that discover
all the things that you never knew were there.
[Jatt] When I first started playing the game,
a lot of people thought the company was a dumpster fire.
You log on Tuesday afternoon, can't play, servers are down.
The store is down again. I crashed out again.
Oh, the client's full of bugs.
[man] It was certainly stressful.
People were running around with their hair on fire a lot of the time
as we were attempting to sort of, keep the wheels on the car.
Any time anything went wrong was like, "Oh, my God, fix this shit right now!
We can't lose this momentum!"
It was a problem where the servers were overloaded,
but no one would log off.
There was this real sense of blink and you'll miss it.
So it was sort of the players fighting the game as much as each other.
[Marshall] Things slowly started to stabilize in North America.
They were way worse in Europe.
European fans were furious.
[Merrill] In Europe, we weren't really growing.
The reason is because we were publishing League of Legends through a partner
that had misaligned interests and weren't trying to operate the game
in the same way that really care about the players.
And that culminated in one particular weekend
where on a Friday the service went down
at like 11:45, 11:50 local time in France
and we actually can't get anyone that will restart the servers
until Monday morning.
It looks fine on the screen, guys, but trust me, it's not.
I'm clicking like a maniac and it's not working for me.
Attack. Attack that one!
Oh, my goodness, gracious me.
I get on the forums with the European players
and just start to see people complaining.
People are just scrambling and upset,
and from the player perspective, Riot doesn't care.
The players don't care about the nuances between partners and other stuff.
Someone's got to be there.
Like, "Hey guys, I know this is bad, but I'm here."
And every 15, 20 minutes like, "Here's an update.
Here's an update. Here's an update."
And when that doesn't happen, the imagination runs wild.
People start to make up stuff and it just goes south really fast.
[Snow] When you're looking at that kind of data,
you realize that the fundamental belief that players are human beings
that deserve to be treated with respect,
and our partner doesn't share it,
that-- That's just-- It's not-- It wasn't going to work.
We were very fortunate in being able to unwind that deal
and then launch Riot Europe.
[keys clacking]
We had exactly 53 days between the moment we hand-shaked
and the moment they were going to stop servicing the game to find a data center,
set up an entity, hire people, catch up localization,
build up a website, setting up the whole thing.
And 53 days later, over a weekend, we transferred the service.
While we were doing the transfer, the volcano went off.
[rumbling]
Tonight, travelers are stranded in all on six continents.
Volcanic ash has caused the worst disruption in air travel since 9/11.
[Snow] So the volcano blows in Iceland, sending soot all across Europe,
canceling all the flights,
literally two days before I'm supposed to transfer the service.
So I had to plan all these alternate flight routes to get hardware in.
We were flying stuff through Africa and then up around the Middle East
to come in to Germany from the ea-- Like, it was insane.
[beeps, whirring]
So, when we took over the service,
North America was about 18% bigger than Europe
and within three months
Europe was nine percent bigger than North America,
and it was growing faster.
After we launched in Europe, we realized we can do a pretty good job by ourselves.
This is actually what our players want. They want a direct relationship with Riot.
The biggest thing that we did very early was establishing the forums
as being a really important conversation and communication
that we would have with players
and that players would have with each other,
actively asking questions, generating content.
[Merrill] Season One was the introduction of ranked ladders, competitive play.
Prior to that time the game was all about playing normal games.
There was no stat tracking.
When ranked entered the scene, all of a sudden,
that's where players who really wanted to test their competitive mettle
had an opportunity in the game to go play against each other.
Let it ride, baby! Let it ride. Boom!
Season One was our first experiment in Esports.
They were just sort of like one -off tournaments with a random set of teams
that were willing and able to show up and often the whole tournament
would be played over the course of a day or two.
And that meant a lot of back to back to back games,
which was also, in some cases, tedious to watch.
And so the Season One finals was going to be our attempt
to wrap that loose season altogether and crown a winner,
and we wanted to do it at DreamHack,
because DreamHack was the biggest LAN party in the world.
[techno music playing]
[Banks] DreamHack is this really cool event
where they take these old aircraft hangers.
There's like 20,000 or 30,000 kids all playing games.
The tables are built out of like pallets
and they bring their own equipment and chairs.
It's one of the coolest gaming events in the world.
[man] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Elmia convention center,
Jönköping, Sweden.
We are here for the DreamHack Summer 2011 championship game.
The final's about to go underway,
$100,000 tournament held by League of Legends and Riot Games.
[Beck] Four hundred thousand people tuned in
to watch the finals of Season One at DreamHack,
which blew our minds.
[Riv] There it is. First blood.
And it looks like it is going to be Jarvan falling down Shueshei.
[woman] It was so interesting to see
this untapped, like, just world of potential
where the fans were passionate and they were fans of the game,
but like, now they're also fans of people playing the game.
[Phreak] One turret's down, they're gonna back off.
Linak taking a lot of damage from Ashe.
Three hundred damage, that is one turret dead, second turret dead.
-[Riv] Oh, my! -[Phreak] Fnatic going to win
the Season One championship!
Congratulations to Fnatic for winning Season One.
-GG. -[Riv] GG indeed.
[all cheering]
[Merrill] When Fnatic won, people were super happy
to see these players that have a career being birthed.
When did you know that you had won?
-A moment ago when their Nexus exploded! -[woman laughs]
[commentator] What are you guys going do with your hard-earned cash?
I want to like, throw a big party for all my friends at home.
[crowd cheering]
[Beck] It was a clear indicator that the level of interest
within our community around Esports was really high.
I don't think that's ever felt like the norm.
At the same time, we were keenly aware of what was going on in Korea.
[music playing]
[man] By the mid-2000s,
digital stadiums were built in Korea for playing Starcraft .
Full-sized stadiums, full of people screaming.
Starcraft is a game where you are not on the field.
You're playing like the coach of a football game.
You're directing Xs and Os.
But one of the things about League is that it has an easier entry ramp.
It's easier to pay attention to the antics of one unit, and one unit, and one unit,
instead of a battlefield with 10,000 units.
It's hard to follow the action if you're not trained.
When we look at early Esports,
part of the reason that they took off in Korea
is because Korea is a small country
that is dense and so it was wired with high speed Internet.
Far higher speed Internet than we have in the United States.
Because the population is dense,
the idea that people could just go downstairs
to the local Internet cafes. That was a thing.
PC gamers view Korea as sort of the Mecca of PC gaming,
where PC gaming is mainstream and where everybody gets it.
You know you can have an airliner that's painted with Starcraft 2 logo
and that's okay, and it makes sense.
That's just a phenomenally cool place to be as a gamer.
[keys clacking]
The competition in Korea is extremely severe.
I would say the most severe in the entire world
if you look at just online games alone.
There are 200 to 400 new games that are published each year
on top of the 200 to 400 games
that are already actively being operated in the market.
[Peterscheck] They also play pretty much only online PC games
and they're almost all free-to-play.
So, when we go to Korea, the novelty of League of Legends in the West,
which is that it's free to play online PC game,
that's nonexistent in Korea.
Everybody has that. So, what else you got?
[in Korean] Cheers ring out from the League of Legends press conference.
These people are not your average individuals.
I just want to say hi to all the League of Legends fans out the there in Korea.
We're getting ready to provide a phenomenal quality of service
and bring the game here to Korea.
[in Korean] I thought it was just lip service,
a marketing policy to be successful in Korea.
But it wasn't that. It was really sincere.
The Korean players as well,
were able to feel a lot of sincerity from Riot Games.
[in Korean] League of Legends, AOS
[Peterscheck] The newest game on the top ten list in Korea
before we launched was like three and a half, four years old.
So very few of these games ever crack the top ten.
Most go up and then go into obscurity very, very quickly.
So we finally launched, and on day six, we break it into top ten,
and we were looking at ourselves thinking, "Holy cow, did this really happen?"
And the next thing we know after three months,
it's the number one game in Korea.
[Oh] To the Korean gamers, it was very different.
It had qualities of competition,
qualities of strategy, qualities of speed
and so many components that a lot of gamers really truly enjoy.
[Peterscheck] I think there's cultural universals.
People want social competition.
As the game grows,
it creates this positive feedback loop
where more and more people know about it,
which means more and more people want to know how to play it,
so they can compete.
[Cadwell] There has to be something about the game
that continues to be rewarding.
For League of Legends , that's mastery, the pursuit of mastery.
Knowing I'm getting better, spending effort to pursue getting better,
feeling rewarded when I have gotten better.
Those are experiences that are appealing regardless of what culture you're in.
["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" playing]
[Koster] Tetris resonated across all the cultures in the world.
So it got that part. But it wasn't sport-like.
The biggest thing that makes a sport is spectators.
League of Legends is what's gotten me into Esports.
There are people cheering out there and really rooting for these pro teams
and League of Legends has really
just come a long way in a short amount of time.
I wanted to watch the LCS, uh, the finals so bad
because it was really something cool to me.
[Merrill] After the Season 1 finals,
I think everybody at Riot was buzzing from the reaction from players
and really started to challenge ourselves to think about, okay,
what does Esports look like for Riot and for League of Legends ?
[man] We knew it was going to be a big undertaking.
We had no road map. We had a really small focused team,
but it wasn't a team that had much prior knowledge in broadcast.
How do we officially get started? Are you going to be kicking us off here?
I believe you have the chat prompt so if you want to tell them to start.
Uh, I don't have chat right here.
[Dustin Beck] When you think of NFL, you think of Sunday football.
You think of marquee matchups on Monday night.
And Esports didn't really have that.
It was these intermittent quarterly tournaments
that had no real rhyme or reason on timing.
It was when's the venue going to be available.
[man] As a player, I had watched League of Legends Esports
since the Season One competitions at DreamHack.
And at the time my impression of League of Legends tournaments,
honestly, is that they were very unreliable.
-Why are you yelling at me? -[man] Are you live?
Yes, we're live! Stop yelling at me.
-Yeah. -Frickin' A.
[Rozelle] This is just not worthy of a fan's time.
We knew at that point we wanted to create a formal league.
[Dustin] We built out what we thought the LCS could be.
We knew it needed a consistent schedule of events,
a weekly regular season with a playoffs, with a World Final event.
[man] You're a little fuzzy. Are you using wireless?
I am using wireless. Do you want me to plug it in? O a--
-If you could, that would be neat. -Yeah.
-Yeah, hold on. -[keys clacking]
[man] I remember meeting Whalen.
I told him like, I'm really worried about what you guys are doing here.
There are all these tournaments and you're gonna start
to formalize it all into this.
Are people going to tune in every single week to watch this?
If you're talking about like scrapping the whole thing and going,
yeah, this Esports thing, I don't know so much about it.
We're strongly committed to Esports at Riot.
So this is-- This is a thing and it's going to be around.
[Beck] Esports enhances the experience of being a player.
You have something to aspire to. Players enjoy watching the game.
That's really the perspective that we take
that makes the most sense for sort of justifying the investment.
But, we definitely like, don't have that crystal ball.
We're going to sort of learn as we go.
When Riot came out and announced the huge things
that they were going to do in Esports,
everyone was really, really skeptical.
We're thinking this was too big, too much, too fast.
It was going to be a disaster. It was going to fail.
[Rozelle] We really laid the foundation for what would eventually become the LCS,
but first we actually had to get through the end of Season Two
and ensuring that we ended strongly
with a good World Championship.
[crowd cheering]
Season Two World Championship was by far the biggest Esports event
Riot had ever put on.
It's going to be really amazing.
The big thing here is World Elite has yet to be seen
in the previous two days of this tournament.
[Beck] We had been having this remarkable tournament
and it's this really cool setting, that was in sort of the courtyard
between the Staples Center and the Nokia Center.
Whoo!
League of Legends number one.
-[all yelling] Taipei Assassins! -Whoo!
[Beck] We're in the middle of W.E., top team from China,
against CLG, top team from EU.
[man] We're CLG. We're like a dark horse coming into the World Finals.
We're doing pretty well for the year, but no one expected us
to really get through to the top.
We're going into the group stages against World Elite.
One of the big Chinese teams at the time.
[host] Only one quarterfinal matchup remains
before two epic semi-final showdowns to determine who will play for the right
to call themselves the Season Two World Champions.
Ladies and gentlemen, the final day
of the Season Two World Playoffs begins now.
[Dustin] That was kind of the peak of Esport popularity at that point.
Stakes were as high as they've ever been for League of Legends Esports,
and we just-- We just fell on our face.
[crowd cheering]
[Beck] The Season Two group stages went from being like one of the best days,
-frankly ever, to one of the worst. -[crowd cheering]
[Dustin] Everything was going great. Amazing team fight.
The game was about to be decided.
And all of a sudden, the Internet goes out.
[Deman] ...I think he was grabbed.
CaoMei's guardian angels does get dropped!
-Oh, my God! -[crowd roaring]
I do not believe what has happened.
You get this little blurb on your screen "Attempting to reconnect."
That's bad.
Just saw attempting to reconnect
and teams lagged out, players lagged out
and everyone's kind of up in arms.
Like, "What the heck just happened there?"
[Deman] Fifty-nine minutes, 30 seconds gone.
Ladies and gentlemen, what the hell?
Normally, like, if there is a pause or a lag issue,
we can kind of fix it at the time,
and our guys are just like nodding their heads like,
"I don't think we're going to get this back."
So we cannot unpause it and recreate where it left off.
And so all the progress into this game is lost.
The game was pretty close at the time. So they decide to do another one.
[Deman] Ladies and gentlemen, there you can see it on your screen.
We are into the game.
Let's hope for the last time in the quarterfinals
because I don't think anyone here will be able to handle another remake.
And it happened again and again.
[Deman] It clearly is adding up, the amount of cheers they've had--
-Oh, my God. -[crowd clamoring]
[Jatt] I don't know what this means.
-Like, are we going to remake again? -Of course they are. We might.
-What else are they going to do? -It could happen.
Imagine you're in any prosporting game
and you have to just start over after you're sweating
and you're out there for 30 minutes. That's what happened.
A typical League of Legends game should go on for about maybe 35 minutes
to 45 minutes, an hour at most.
We played this one game in the group stages for seven hours.
No matter how long League of Legends Esports goes,
if it grows on for ten years and becomes bigger than the Super Bowl,
all those things, everyone who was here will be like,
"Remember when they had a seven hour best of three,"
and everyone will know what they're talking about.
And we're sitting on stage saying, "Riot, is this game going to happen?"
Where is the competitive integrity? Where is all this other stuff?
These teams were playing. What are you going to do about it?
[Beck] Eventually, we just decide, you know, we got to pull the plug.
We had to send our audience home
without having finished the group stages, even though they purchased tickets.
We were so disappointed in ourselves.
Like we were-- We had just--
We'd built up this huge event and we just like let everyone down.
[crowd clamoring]
[Jatt] It was the biggest tournament. It was a high profile failure.
That's something that could totally alter the course of Riot Esports.
First step was letting our fans know and Brandon bit the bullet on that one.
And he's like, "I'm going to go out there and talk to everyone."
It kills us to have to deliver this news
because you guys have been so unbelievably patient with us,
but let me explain exactly what's going on.
We've been having a myriad of Internet connectivity issues.
Given what these players have been through so far today,
we think the possibility of another restart on a game
would just be unfair to them.
We recognize the sacrifice
that you guys have made being patient with us today.
I want to talk about what we're going to do for you guys, the live audience.
We're going to be refunding your tickets.
I'm sure you don't care about that. We're going to be refunding your tickets.
We're going to be giving you guys $25 in Riot Points.
[crowd cheering]
One more thing.
We also have a merchandise store full of stuff
and we want to give that to you guys, too, for free.
[crowd cheering]
[Vu] At that point we open up the merch store.
We said everybody can get, you know, merch for free.
We ordered pizza for all the people who were staying there.
I want to just one more time, we're so sorry about this.
Literally, we've been scrambling like crazy.
We've been having so much fun.
-Thank you. -[crowd cheering]
And they start to chant, Riot.
[all chanting] Riot! Riot! Riot!
[Beck] They were actually, remarkably understanding at the end.
That felt amazing.
[Dustin] Our ops team built an offline server.
They ripped a server out of our data center
and made it so that the Internet can no longer mess with our tournaments.
And then that kind of fueled us into Galen Center,
which was a couple days later for the live event for the finals.
Rivington the Third here coming to you
live from USC's Galen Center in Los Angeles.
Guys, let's take a moment to go behind the scenes
and just see what's going into the production of the world finals.
Right now, the grand final stage
in the process of being built in preparation
for the League of Legends Season Two World Finals.
[crowd applauding]
[commentator] TPA was in the driver's seat.
Toyz was on Oriana yet again
and his shock wave into Stanley's taunt gave them complete control,
locking up two members of Azubu leading to a Baron.
Not playing like the underdog any longer,
the Taipei Assassins push their way to the Nexus
defeating Azubu Frost to become the Season Two World Champions.
Against all odds they take home one million dollars,
the Summoner's Cup and the righ to be called champions of the world.
[crowd cheering]
[all chanting] TPA! TPA! TPA!
[Beck] Our own naiveté was actually an advantage in those early years.
We never really felt like it was going to be real,
like, more than sort of like a dream,
but players were just showing up en masse and filling all the seats,
and it felt justified.
It didn't feel like we were being extravagant or crazy.
It felt like, we can do this.
And then the question became, "How the heck do we pull it off?
Like, how do we broadcast this?"
I was the guy that had the broadcast experience
and I had worked at NBC
and I had worked on sports before Esports.
There were a lot of aspects of broadcast sports
that we were able to bring into this new frontier
where there were these young people
who are so passionate about playing this game.
It's like opening up a new world for them
that added some of that drama of live TV.
We're trying to find the right blend of sport, game, and kind of show.
[crowd] Demacia!
[Rozelle] We have to stay true to League of Legends .
There are some sort of ceremonial game show almost aspect to it.
We're going to ask some of our fans
if they could marry a champion, who would it be?
-I'd marry Leona. -I love the Teemo.
I would marry Teemo because of the hat.
[Rozelle] In Season Three, we had to grow our talent pool,
our on-air personality pool before we could even host an analyst desk.
And that's something we wanted to do from the get go.
Because we're big football fans
and we know that it's not just about watching the game.
It's about watching the analysis.
He's in the worst shape of all. He's down to half health
and he's going to get dropped by Cybolic, Vladimir, right here.
[Gafford] With professional Esports players,
when they started even playing League of Legends ,
Esports didn't exist.
For them, they've just suddenly gotten dragged and dropped
into this world of stardom and fandom.
[gamer] When I first decided to pursue this,
my dad definitely thought it was a bad idea.
[Snoopeh] I was playing from Scotland.
There's this stigma that's attached with gaming in general,
which is when your mom's basically on your case all the time saying,
"Get off the computer, go and do something productive."
There was an educating process with my parents in regards to, you know,
this is a-- This can be a big deal.
Let's go baby, double kill! Get that top tower!
We overestimated the pro player ability to like actually engage with the crowd
because, again, these are 17, 18, 19-year-old kids
who aren't used to being stars.
[LemonNation] I had to start doing interviews and dealing with fans.
I definitely was not good at that,
I've really always been scared of like public speaking
and being on stage and all of that kind of thing.
[Phreak] Welcome back to the show.
Phreak here with LemonNation and Ballz from the victorious Quantic Gaming.
You guys didn't make it through groups.
How do you feel when you're like, a favorite
and you like-- What does that do to you?
Uh... it was very depressing. We were joking about suicide.
[both chuckle]
I've always been too awkward I guess, you know?
[chuckles]
Sometimes they don't understand the importance of, you know,
giving a good interview
and doing all these promotional activities.
They don't realize that what they're signing up for
is not just playing this game at a professional level,
but it's being this kind of celebrity player.
You have this huge amount of influence and eyes on you all the time.
It's keeping sponsors happy and keeping your fans engaged
and a lot of it is growing up, you know, very quickly.
It sounds like a really easy job. Like, you play video games for a living?
That sounds great. My kid would love to do that.
It's not that easy.
It puts an immense amount of pressure on you as a player.
There's no respite, there's no hiding.
You're constantly online. And if I'm not online, I'm missing out.
[Allen] If I practice football for eight hours in a day,
I am completely exhausted.
I have no more energy left.
I go home and I rest and I come back the next day.
Esports doesn't have that physical limitation.
[Snoopeh] We could be playing anywhere between ten to 14 hours a day,
and that's just playing. That's not necessarily the thinking.
I go to bed and I'm thinking about the game.
[Ocelote] If you can play for 12 or 13 hours, you should.
But, that takes a toll on you. It's like a hammer on your head.
Boom, boom, boom. Everyday. Boom, boom, boom.
[Riv] It looks like Dyrus is down for the count already.
[Kobe] That is classic Dyrus right there.
[man] He's going to have to be careful, keeping an eye on...
When I was a player, I knew the risks, but I felt like I was a gladiator,
you know, in an arena and I had to entertain the people.
[Riv] They could look to finish it.
[Allen] Good Esports games are all about moments.
League of Legends has these peaks and valleys.
When the Jungler is coming up through the river,
the suspense starts to build as he goes in for a gank.
And the crowd in anticipation is like, "Oh, what's going to happen?"
No!
The xPeke backdoor play is probably one, if not the most, famous play of all time.
It's time for the last League of Legends game of the day
and it's a big one, ladies and gentlemen.
-Please welcome Fnatic Raidcall! -[crowd cheering]
[Horn] xPeke is playing for Fnatic.
He's going up against Ocelote and SK Gaming.
Do you have something to say to your rivals?
-Have fun. -Okay. Thank you very much, guys.
[Horn] xPeke uses his teleport to sneak into the opponent's base.
[announcer] ...he instantly teleports straight...
[Horn] He only needs to get one more shot on him
and he'll be dead and SK would have won.
And he's able to keep rift walking around the Nexus for several seconds
while he's evading the other defense coming in.
[commentator] Is anyone going to be able to deal with this one?
Catches him with another axe. He's very low on health.
They're pushing on the Nexus.
And he's able to take down the Nexus.
-I do not believe it! -Oh, my God!
They slaughtered them!
[crowd cheering]
xPeke and Fnatic were just in utter disbelief.
Ocelote and SK, they were very, very upset.
This is the ultimate drama with so much on the line.
This really does feel a lot like sports.
We are just destroyed right now as a team.
[clears throat]
[voice breaking] And we failed. We failed.
[Ocelote] I'm not going to lie.
Even today, I'm a bit salty about that one.
[chuckles] Um... it was a good play,
especially in that context, great tournament, important game.
[crowd cheering]
As bad as that moment was, when it comes into competition,
you always need competitors that you want to destroy.
[Snoopeh] As a professional gamer, there's no balance.
You just can't afford to have a social life.
But, then you have to realize why we all do it.
Like, we love the competition.
We love saying "we're the best." We love kicking someone else's ass.
That's what we all strive for.
We strive to prove ourselves on a world stage.
[metal clanking]
[cheering]
[Beck] Marc and I grew up in LA. Staples is the home of the Lakers.
So, being here today is just, I don't know how to describe it.
It's just really sentimental.
Welcome to the Season Three World Championship Final!
Coming to you live from the Staples Center
here in Los Angeles, California.
[crowd cheering]
And we've got the double boxes and double redundancies?
We have two servers. We have Internet back-up.
We have back-up power.
[crowd cheering]
This is the spot where we will bring you guys
all the analysis, the highlights, and the predictions for tonight's final,
starting with our extended pre-game coverage.
Yeah. Good luck. Crush it. See you, guys.
[Horn] By bringing up the players on a lift
and using technology to sort of elevate this new type of sport,
for us that felt like another step forward.
SK Telecom, they will be the Season three World Champions!
[Rozelle] League is such an international game
and the international leagues are so popular.
We knew we wanted to take it on the road.
Korea was the obvious choice.
[in Korean] The Seoul World Cup stadium is, to Koreans,
a very historic place.
The fact that it's possible to do Esports in a place like this
with 40,000 paid spectators gathering,
that becomes huge news.
Forty thousand people? What the hell? 40,000 people?
[Phreak] The opening ceremony will begin shortly with traditional Korean music
followed by a live performance from Imagine Dragons,
playing their hit song "Warriors."
♪ We are the warriors ♪
[in Korean] Spending big money on events like this isn't very common.
Especially in a place like Korea,
parents with young children consider games to be harmful.
If you enjoy games too much,
you can't study well and go to a good college.
You can't get a good job.
Until these perceptions change,
it's difficult to say when it will be acknowledged as a sport.
[crowd cheering]
Hello, Berlin! [speaking German]
Ladies and gentlemen, are you guys ready
for the 2015 League of Legends World Championship?
[crowd cheering]
[announcer] At Mid Lane, Faker!
[Gafford] Then you have players like Faker.
Who, I guess if there is a Michael Jordan
of League of Legends or Esports, this is the guy.
I think almost universally considered the best player,
Faker has remained dominant for years now.
He's just that good.
I have so much to tell you, but my English is not good.
So, thank you and... thank for cheering and always loving me.
[crowd cheering]
It feels like we're returning to our roots,
but with way better production values
and capabilities to actually deliver a show like this.
[Horn] We used projection on the floor
to demonstrate how the field position would work on the Rift.
[Dustin] You could feel as the stakes rose,
the intensity of the fans and of the players
and the entire vibe of the event.
[Quickshot] SK Telecom have overcome every challenge.
They are the undisputed best team in the world!
The SKT reign continues.
They win their third World Championship!
-[crowd cheering] -[Kobe] Truly a legend.
[crowd cheering] Faker! Faker! Faker!
[Riv] Faker became such a big player,
because he could do all these mechanically advanced moves,
always hitting everything at the right second.
That's where idols come in.
That's where you start wanting to be like somebody.
Today's games were absolutely awesome!
I lost my voice because I was screaming too loud.
It was the best experience I've ever had for League .
[Gafford] Because they have spent virtually zero dollars
on traditional marketing,
League of Legends has kind of flown underneath the radar by the mainstream.
Suddenly, when all these stories started popping up about Esports
and these tournaments and, "Wow, the Staples Center
was sold out for this massive event,"
you naturally had a lot of derision from traditional media.
[female reporter] It's a pastime some think is symbolic of slackers,
-of teenagers killing time. -[crowd cheering]
But video gaming is now a professional sport.
[NBC4 reporter] You could call it the Super Bowl of video gaming.
It's the biggest competitive event we've never heard of.
-[NBC4 reporter] League of Legends. -[female reporter] League of Legends.
-[reporter 1] League of Legends. -[reporter 2] League of Legends.
[radio host] What is League of Legends ?
[man] League of Legends is the most played, like, game ever.
-The most--? -The most played, downloaded game.
Oh, because it's-- it's an Internet game?
I had zero knowledge of the fact that this exists.
You didn't know there were cyber athletes?
My hand to God, I didn't know.
But my issue is it's still not a sport. It's a game.
Have you guys seen Esports and the Eleague?
I don't know if that's sports.
Do you have any statistics
on how many of those people also go to Star Trek conventions?
[ MMA Hour host] I find it very bizarre.
I feel like it's really-- this is the sign of the apocalypse
that people are actually into this sort of thing.
[man] I don't feel that way. I'm kind of excited about this.
I can understand people watching a golf game.
-[announcer] No. -[crowd cheers]
[man] I can't understand people
watching somebody play a computer game.
Well, I have to say my wife can't understand people
watching a golf game because she's not a golfer.
So, if you're not a gamer that's not going to appeal to you.
For a lot of the older folks, they're like, amazed by it.
They're like, how could people watch other people playing a game?
The flip side is we watch other people playing a game all the time.
-Games like basketball, football, etc. -Yeah.
-[baseball commentator] Throw home! -[basketball commentator] Won't go!
I like sitting down and watching League of Legends games.
Like, I don't normally watch sports either. [chuckles]
Which is funny because I played a lot of sports.
[football commentator] Chris Kluwe is perfect.
Chris' right footed punt. Very high.
[Kluwe] You have five guys working together on a team
and if they don't work together
then the other team's going to beat them, and I mean, that's what a team sport is.
[Gafford] You have traditional sports athletes
like Rick Fox enter the space with his own team.
[Fox] They are digital athletes.
They're professional digital athletes. No look, can you think about--
look, I think about what it took for me to become a professional athlete.
Took a lot of concentration,
a lot of dedication, practice, preparation, stamina.
They're sponsored. They have careers.
They make hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[Allen] The average salary for a player is close to $300,000 a year.
[Gafford] There is rumors like Faker
turned down multimillion dollar salaries in China.
[reporter] Players are now even eligible for U.S. P1 visas
normally reserved for touring athletes.
What is a P1A visa?
A P1A visa is a visa that's given for athletes,
which means that you are an exceptional athlete
from another country coming into the United States
and you have to prove that your athletic capabilities are good enough
to guarantee you living inside the United States.
The Worlds? Is this the equivalent of the Super Bowl in my world?
Yeah, I would say so.
Except the only difference would be if the Super Bowl is just U.S.
This is like, there's 13 countries that play this game,
and they all come together for the World Championship.
The best Korean team comes to the States to play
the best North American team.
The best team in China come to play.
It's the best team. Trained together for a whole year.
Right. That's the difference.
So, you're getting the games at the highest level.
[crowd cheering]
Oh, my God!
Quadrakill from Fnatic! Quadrakill from Fnatic.
The feeling in there is exactly the same as being on an field.
You have fans cheering. You have, you know, big plays developing.
You have moments of glory and moments of defeat.
[football commentator] Eli throwing into traffic on the sideline.
[Horn] It'll be really interesting to see if the sustainability is there
and whether we can take League and build it
into what can be generationally relevant.
The way that we identify with teams be it
if we're a Red Sox fan and we're long suffering until the 2000s.
[baseball commentator] The Boston Red Sox are World Champions!
[Horn] We want to see that type of generational rich fabric
of fandom that goes beyond year to year.
That's the goal to have Esports become sports that last.
The growth around League of Legends and the growth around Esports
has been tightly coupled with accessibility of the content.
Live streaming Twitch and YouTube and Facebook,
all these places you can watch this content.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Greatest League Talk Show .
I am your host, Scarra.
Streaming has become such a generational thing.
Some people don't want to watch sports
or they don't want to watch, like, TV, but they want to watch gaming.
Use a slow roll. Wait for peopl to slowly smash your face in.
They are gamers and in their free time they want to watch what they love.
All the top streamers are usually old professional players.
They're kind of going to have to start fights off of Scarra.
If he can land really, really good ults, he'll just make things happen.
[Scarra] I ended up being like, one of the first ever educational streamers.
I would talk about what I'm doing.
Now, that sounds crazy right? Super easy. But is it?
Ideally, you don't want to get into a range to Q over...
Think about you narrating your life, every aspect of your life every day.
That's what we're doing.
100 and f-- Oh, my God!
I have a subscriber base
where they pay a certain amount every month to support me.
They can support me through donations, and they can support me just by watching
because I make money through ad revenue as well.
I am currently making six figures right now.
I will eventually be a millionaire.
-Oh, my God, what a game. -[game voice-over] Victory!
Infernal! Sorry.
[girl] I was exposed to Twitch via my online friends
and I started watching these streamers and I got hooked on it
and I'd watch them and I'd be like, "Wow, I love what they do!
I wish I could do that someday."
Aw, give me the penta, dude!
As a streamer, I'm here to entertain,
I want to make people laugh, smile, and I want to enjoy what I do.
Yes, yes! All three CS.
I did a lot of stuff like student council in high school,
was a part of clubs, dance team, soccer team, stuff like that.
I really love making friends
and I remember hitting triple digits, "100 people watching."
I thought that was like, the biggest deal ever.
Nowadays I average like 5,000 to 10,000 people watching me.
People come up to you and they say like,
"I watched your stream and you really helped me through a tough time where
I lost a parent or I lost a friend"
Thanks, Chenyascream!
Welcome to the Poki squad, appreciate 'ya.
You really help people stay happy and feel company just by streaming.
So, I'm going to play with a bunch of my viewers right now.
We're all just loading into a game.
[game sounds]
[Ocelote] I love human interaction.
And there's just no better way to interact digitally
with anyone than with live streaming, period.
[Marshall] Ocelote was a streamer back in the early days of League of Legends .
There's comic timing to everything. Even anger.
And if you're charismatic and funny about being angry and furious,
-that can go a long way. -[screams]
It was kind of one of the first streams that banked on being entertainingly toxic.
Ocelote, Ocelote, Ocelote, yeah
When you're immature,
when you haven't lived through a lot of ups and downs in life,
then you get thrown a bad teammate, in a bad moment,
in front of a few thousand people watching you,
and then that amount of pressure, peer pressure.
It's just everything comes too fast,
and you just feel very frustrated about the situation.
And you say things that you don't even feel yourself, you know.
[Allen] In the case of Ocelote,
he would say terrible things to insult people
whether it's your opponent and you're just trash talking them
or it's your own teammate on your team
that has not performed up to your standards.
Riot had to get involved and say,
"If you're going to be a professional athlete
representing not only League of Legends,
but Riot Games, playing in this League , you're going to need to clean it up."
[Ocelote] Of course there was no ill intent. And I'm a kid.
I remember it was about the time that my father, actually,
was going through chemotherapy.
But reacting that badly, especially in front of people,
is the worst thing you can do.
You know, because these kids look up to you.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
Showing them that kind of bad side of competition
is the worst thing you can do.
I remember the community and Riot being extremely fair.
Being judgmental, which helped me also be self -reflective.
But at the same time, being empathetic,
and giving me a second chance, which they did.
So, I'm incredibly grateful for that.
Thank you very much to all of you. I love you all. Bye.
While there's one case of Ocelote,
there are a hundred cases of players
who have not reformed, who have not cut out the toxicity.
[Koster] The Internet has this amazing power to create crowds
and crowds create anonymity.
[keys clacking]
[Kim] Because it's free-to-play,
you can get people coming into the game from anywhere
and you can have people having
almost zero accountability for their actions there.
[Marshall] League of Legends has a really bad reputation
for being toxic because you're in a high pressure situation.
There are a lot of factors outside of your control.
[laughing]
I can see why people get frustrated
and I can see why in today's online culture
that frustration turns into something pretty ugly.
[man] No fucking joke. I'm not kidding. Kill yourself.
[woman] It's very similar to what you see in road rage, for example.
It leads to that "flash in the pan" rage where we tend to act out.
The part that I find very painful, just as a gamer,
is that my crime is that I show up as a woman.
I don't play on voice chat
because you're going to figure out pretty quickly
that I'm not of the male persuasion,
and so that usually leads to, you know, variety of your classic,
"get back to the kitchen" comments
to nasty stuff that I'm totally not going to repeat here.
[Marshall] I don't think it's a League of Legends specific problem.
I think it's a gaming problem.
For a lot of us, it's become white noise.
If we got legitimately upset, we would never play.
You almost have to learn a bit about human psychology
and realize that this person must be in such a terrible place
to be doing that kind of thing.
I almost feel bad for them in that sense.
Although you can get a lot of hate,
I try to focus more on how to fix the situation
as opposed to being mad at it.
[groans]
[Koster] Early League started out small enough
that many of these problems didn't manifest.
-[shrieks] -[Koster] Then it grew.
At some point, League said we need to take this seriously.
We need to engage in the process of governance.
[Phreak] Welcome to the Tribunal.
The Tribunal allows you to shap player behavior for the better,
acting directly on reports from fellow players.
We built a penalty system for that.
And we even experimented with trying to pull the community in
and have them be the arbiters of what deserved a penalty or what didn't.
[Phreak] After reviewing the chat log, I decide that I want to punish him.
But, if we jump in there and we're like, "You can't do that"
and "That's terrible" and all of these different things.
Then what happens is we just collectively as people dig our heels in.
Like, "Whoa, this is change. Whoa, what's happening?"
That's what lead us to say, "Let's figure out what this gap is."
And it turned out that it was encouragement.
It was telling folks when they're doing a great job,
that they're doing a great job.
Instead of it always being about the punishments,
let's celebrate with players.
And that has worked so much better
than just strictly focusing on those penalties.
But we're never going to reach perfect. There is no perfect.
There is no end state.
There's just this ongoing understanding of players.
[gamer] Even though people might say that the community is toxic,
I feel like we can make it a better place
by being support talkers rather than trash talkers.
Toxicity is negative.
Let's not keep that up. We're all about good times.
[gamer 2] I'm here to say that there is a whole side
that never gets talked about full of awesome people
who are being really good to each other.
So, keep playing League . [clicks tongue]
League of Legends is part of a very big movement.
It's the players and fans that are all coming together
to craft this experience together.
-[man] League of-- -[all] Legends!
[Gafford] It's not just a bunch of people independently consuming something.
It is a ton of people all over the world creating something.
For them, it's about the characters themselves.
It's this character driven situation
where you kind of assume the fantasy of this game.
[Koster] The huge cast of characters that has developed
is one of the reasons why League can have that popularity.
It gives that access.
We're generally looking for something that we identify with,
and that means that anybody can come to that and find a way in.
[woman] I thought the art of the characters was so cool.
This looks really fun and interesting and I really like it.
[gamer 3] Heimerdinger does have that best swag walk.
-Yeah, he has that swag. -Heimerdinger swag!
[Heimerdinger] Order, entropy, a never-ending cycle.
Oh, my God, I love Graves.
They made that Graves skin with like, no shirt and I was like, mm!
Feeling lucky? Try me.
I connect with it so much that I am Draven.
[laughs]
My favorite character by far is Teemo. He is an underdog.
He is a little guy. He's not strong. He's very fast.
He can't really fight you straight up one on one.
I like him because he is super relatable to basically anyone.
[Teemo] Armed and ready!
It doesn't matter if you're from China or Korea or USA,
you see this guy and you're like, "I know what that character is all about."
The characters have such vibrant backgrounds and personality to them.
And that's the reason why, for example, you see so many people cosplaying.
It's not just, like, a generic character.
It's they're rich and full of life.
I'm a casual player.
But I'm playing Wukong, obviously.
He's a fun character to play.
[Merrill] You do not want to mess with that dude.
Seven foot, virtually unkillable barbarian warrior is coming at you
with a sword that can cleave you in two.
The designers decided to name him after a character
that I had played in EverQuest , which was a barbarian warrior.
So they thought Tryndamere was a really cool name
and just fit the persona.
A lot of players, when I'm playing, get disappointed
if I'm not playing Tryndamere. They're like, "Please play Tryndamere."
What's the secret to League of Legends?
It's this right here. It's the community.
-Oh. -Look around. Do a 360.
That's the secret. That's literally it. [chuckles]
[man] It's hard for me because my parents don't really understand
like, all this stuff, you know?
I've played with these guys for like, a year now, if not longer.
And it's just like, I talk to these guys every single day.
For me to actually come and finally meet them, it's so cool!
And when we're playing online,
it's nice to come on and have family or a community that understands that.
In games, there's no borders that typically exist.
Like when I meet someone online, I am meeting them at face value.
I know nothing about them, I can't see them.
I don't know what race they are.
I don't know what their socioeconomic background is.
I don't know if they're important or not. Like, it doesn't matter.
[announcer] Where are you guys from?
North Dakota.
Austin, Texas.
Anchorage, Alaska.
-Ugh. -Pittsburgh.
-[both] Chicago. -Vancouver.
[whoops]
League of Legends becomes this universal language in of itself.
Like, I can be in Shanghai
and see somebody with a Teemo hat and instantaneously we have this bond.
And can talk about like, "Oh, Teemo!" and have smiles and laughs.
It was just a hugely cool thing to see the passion
that players would have for League of Legends ,
you know, in all these different parts of the world.
[Beck] Publishers like to think of markets
as just completely different internationally.
But I think gamers around the world have an awful lot in common
that people don't necessarily recognize or appreciate.
[overlapping chatter]
[Gafford] As huge and crazy as it is,
they've only managed to make this one game.
And while they've certainly admitted that there are more games in the pipeline,
how much pressure must there be on you if you're working on one of those projects
to follow up something like a League of Legends ?
You know, is League of Legends the best game Riot will ever make?
Is it the biggest game they will ever make?
I don't know, but there's a chance it could be.
[Marshall] Ever since League of Legends really kicked off
and became just sort of a phenomenon,
everyone's sort of waiting to see when it will die.
Every game dies.
Starcraft was the Esport for a long time and it faded away.
[LemonNation] I don't think a game can last forever.
I think eventually another game will overlap it
as, you know, like the biggest Esport. I think that's just the nature of Esports.
[Allen] There are more Esports titles out there.
There are more games taking up mind share.
It's a little bit of an arms race of who's going to be doing it best.
Who's going to invest more people and more resources
into Esports and competition?
We're in a make or break time for Esports.
Like, this thing needs to continue to grow
at the rate that it's projected to grow. People talk about it by 2020,
it's going to be a $1.5 billion business every year.
All these investors have come in buying the hype,
buying the speculation, where this thing is going.
If it doesn't go that way, this whole ecosystem
is at risk of collapsing.
[in Chinese] This is Beijing, China. Welcome to the 2017 World Championship!
[Horn] We wanted to go to China and set up a show in the Bird's Nest.
The home of the Olympics.
That presents a lot of risks and it's scary.
This is the exact track in which Usain Bolt
broke his own 100-meter record.
[Horn] Most sports have 100 years of history.
We have under ten.
We know that we need to develop deeper bonds
with potential partners and sponsors and we are incredibly motivated.
So much of it has been about Faker, as it always is.
But this year, when they've needed him most,
he has played better than ever before.
We wanted to create memories with these big events
and we know that those memories are what carry on.
When people look back, they think of these kind of flashbulb moments.
Those are the things that you can't really value,
because it was a moment that all of us will remember forever.
[roars]
[Phreak] The upset is complete as the kills come through.
The SKT dynasty is over. All hail the new kings!
Samsung Galaxy,
-your 2017 World Champions! -[crowd cheering]
[Deficio] Every single player talks about revenge
against SKT and they got it.
Faker is destroyed.
[Koster] Once a phenomenon like League of Legends happens,
you can't undo the effect it's had.
It may evolve, it may change, but it doesn't just disappear.
The impact I think has barely begun to be felt.
It might even be a generation before we truly see it.
Our parents always kind of thought that we would stop playing these games.
And I think we're just starting to hit the point
where people feel like games are here to stay.
[Pokimane] Almost everybody can be considered a gamer.
Whether it be Candy Crush on your phone
or whether you scrim League eight hours every day.
You know, everybody can enjoy some type of game.
[Scarra] League of Legends is a lifestyle.
I think the only thing my parents want is me to find a girlfriend.
And that's it. [laughs]
My parents are just like, "You got to pursue a love life."
And I'm just like, "I'm busy playing League, how do I do that?"
I came out on League of Legends with my boyfriend.
I play League of Legends because my friends forced me to.
We ended up building a really strong relationship through League of Legends ,
strong enough that he decided to make me his best man at his wedding.
[Beck] League of Legends isn't done, it hasn't reached its full potential.
We're not perfect and we don't get it all right,
but, man, I just think it's such a privilege
to help make the types of games
that I most love to experience.
[Merrill] We realize that it's not about us.
It's about our audience that we're trying to serve.
You're no longer who you were. You are now part of something greater.
[Beck] Everything that we do is made possible by the community,
their level of engagement, their level of support.
The community is the game.
Nice job, guys. [chuckles]
GG! [chuckles]
[theme music playing]