A gaming event in a League of its own
Millions of people watched the League of Legends World Finals at the O2 Arena. I had the pleasure of being there.
Last weekend, twenty thousand fans packed the O2 Arena in London to watch the League of Legends World Finals. 10+ million more watched the live stream across the world, simultaneously broadcast in 22 languages through a network of partners. The event was sponsored by heavy hitters including Mastercard, Mercedes and Amazon Web Services.
This wasn't your usual sporting event: This was an Esports event, with ten top of the range gaming PCs at the centre of the arena.
League of Legends, launched in 2009 by Riot Games, is known as a MOBA: Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. In the game, two teams of five face off on an isometric map to attempt to destroy the enemy base. Each player controls a champion (from a dizzying choice of over 140), each with a different combination of abilities. A game typically lasts 30-40 minutes as each team builds up resources and attempts to control key parts of the map.
The game combines the need for both mechanical and strategic skills. Strategy includes the drafting stage, where each team picks the Champions they intend to use for the next game. The teams also get to deny the opposing team a number of champions of their choice too. 'Cat and mouse' only begins to cover the back and forth of this decision making process and the game itself.
League of Legends owes much of its popularity to uptake in Korea and China: In Korea, 37.3% of all time spent playing games on PCs is with LoL, and there is even a League of Legends Park / Esports stadium. Fittingly the final was contested by teams from those countries. The popularity has led to spin-offs too, such as Netflix’s Arcane animated series. Netflix doesn’t break out viewing figures, but the series hit the top of the viewing charts in 52 countries upon release. It was also a critical success, with a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The series allegedly cost around $250 million to produce.
Behind the scenes
I had the great opportunity of being invited on a Behind The Scenes tour of the O2 Arena on the day before the Finals. Due to the secrecy around the Opening Ceremony (technical rehearsals were ongoing at the time we were walking through the main arena), mobile phones had to be handed in first.
The sheer scale of the event soon started to come into focus. As a starter, this was a hyper-scale live broadcast sporting event: 72 cameras, 80 transmission lines and 256 audio channels. All the networking to support this had to be put in, and there were big bundles of thick cables pinned to the walls throughout the tour. Then we have the opening ceremony complete with its pyrotechnics (The largest number featured in any O2 show to date). And then the fact that the games themselves needed to be played in a reliable, secure and zero latency manner.
One of the first facts mentioned was that a team of over 1,500 people were making this event happen on-site, with a massive catering tent sitting outside in the car park.
The final production does not happen on-site. The raw feeds from the cameras and gaming PCs are sent to Riot Games’ Remote Broadcast Centre in Dublin. It is there that the live editing happens, and the feeds are packaged up for the streaming partners. SVG Europe has a great article on everything that is involved. Given that these events happen worldwide, it minimises the number of people that need to travel in order to execute on the production, as well as reducing set-up and teardown time.
League of Legends is traditionally played over the Internet, but for events such as this the game servers are on-site. We got to see the outside of the server room (or rather, trailer) in the periphery of the arena, complete with its own security guard and pictures of who was allowed to enter. Playing with effectively zero latency changes the mechanics of the game, and so the professional players get to practice beforehand in a replicated environment in their hotel.
The Main Event
The Opening Ceremony featured Ashnikko, Linkin Park and more. It was an amazing experience, complete with the ‘made famous by Coldplay’ PixMob bracelets flashing all over the place.
In fact, you can watch it right here!
Elie, Creative Director at Riot Games posted this fascinating Behind the Scenes footage on TikTok of the final preparations leading up to the day.
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And it would have been remiss of me not to feature my own TikTok video (which covers the Opening Ceremony and the closing moments of gameplay). Yes, this definitely means you should subscribe to my TikTok if you haven’t already.
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There is a risk in these Finals that one team totally dominates, winning 3-0 in the ‘Best of 5’ and it being a shorter day out. Korean team T1 were the favourites going in, featuring Esports legend ‘Faker’ (nickname: ‘The unkillable demon king’) who is an outlier both in terms of skill and length as an LoL pro. An average pro only plays at that level for 2-3 years. Faker has managed over 10, with an estimated annual salary of $4-5 million.
Their opponents, Bilibili Gaming, rocked the boat by decisively winning the first game, pushing aggressively within the first few minutes. GAME ON! Both teams played hard to take it to 2-2 and the deciding game. At this point, the playing style of both teams changed: The game was exceptionally cagey with both teams playing not to lose. Suddenly, T1 found a break, and after an epic battle they were able to rush the enemy base and win the Final. Cue total scenes, pyrotechnics and epic music.
What’s next?
There is a wide selection of Esports games on the market, although League of Legends tends to be pull in the highest viewing figures. The Grand-Daddy of them all is Valve Software’s Counter-Strike, a first-person shooter (FPS) with Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists battling on maps in different scenarios. CS started life in 1999, with up to 24 million players monthly (peaking in 2020), and 2.4 million people watched the PGL Majors in Stockholm in the same year. Riot Games were inspired by Counter-Strike to create VALORANT: Same gameplay, but with their own graphical flair and introducing ‘Agents’ with different abilities to mix things up a bit.
Esports globally was valued at $1.88 billion in 2022, with expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.8% from 2023 to 2030. My experience of the weekend shows how it is appealing to a huge cross-spectrum of an audience as well, turning out to watch the event live when historically they would have been playing and watching from their homes.
It inspired me to fire up VALORANT again. But it may be a while before I’m walking out on stage at the O2 Arena as Linkin Park rock out.
