The updates to Riot’s “League of Legends” ecosystem were announced by Riot esports head John Needham during a “Dev Update” posted to the official “League of Legends” YouTube channel on June 11. The biggest change was the consolidation of Riot’s “League of Legends” leagues in the Americas — the North American LCS, the Latin American LLA and the Brazilian CBLOL league — under a single umbrella.

The new league, so far left unnamed, will be split into North and South regional conferences. Each conference will consist of eight teams, with the LCS contributing six teams to the North conference and CBLOL contributing six teams to the South conference. For each conference, the remaining two team slots will be filled by one team from Latin America and one team from the second tier of “League of Legends” esports, determined via a promotion and relegation system.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

The record attendance of DreamHack Dallas 2024 was reflected in an expansion of the event’s sponsorship business this year. Advertisers such as Porsche, Logitech and Intel were heavily featured on the show floor and alongside the festival’s packed schedule of esports tournaments.

Throughout the weekend, brands’ booths and activations drew ample foot traffic, with many attendees treating them no differently than the rest of DreamHack’s non-sponsored content. (Editor’s Note: DreamHack owner ESL/FACEIT Group paid for this reporter’s travel and lodging at DreamHack Dallas.)

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

It’s become apparent that publisher ownership of esports leagues, once the esports industry’s dominant business model, is on the decline. Instead of operating their own events, publishers are increasingly enlisting third-party event vendors to do the job. 

At the moment, there are several active companies that operate leagues for major esports publishers, including Blast, WDG and PGL — but the largest by far is ESL/FACEIT Group (EFG), a German company that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund purchased for $1.5 billion in 2022. (Editor’s Note: ESL/FACEIT Group paid for this reporter’s travel and lodging at the EFG-owned event DreamHack Dallas on June 2.)

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

It’s no secret that Saudi Arabian money has fueled esports in recent years. From ESL/FACEIT Group (EFG) to the Esports World Cup, many of the industry’s largest leagues and events belong to the Saudi Arabian government, either directly or via Savvy Games Group, the gaming arm of the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. (Editor’s Note: ESL/FACEIT Group paid for this reporter’s travel and lodging at the EFG-owned event DreamHack Dallas on June 2.)

In the past, esports companies’ flirtations with Saudi Arabian capital have been met with protests from esports fans. In 2020, for example, Riot Games announced a partnership with the Saudi planned mega-city Neom, only to end the partnership the next day following pushback from both fans and Riot employees, who expressed discomfort with Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Over the past two decades, esports companies have thrown a wide variety of spaghetti at the metaphorical wall of profitability, with most of it failing to stick. 

First came esports team streaming payments and esports league media rights deals with Twitch, which dried up a few years ago. Then came esports companies’ flirtation with crypto and gambling money, a source of investment that cratered during the crypto winter of 2022 and 2023.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

It’s been just over a year since Epic Games revamped the ecosystem of “Fortnite,” a popular video game that allows users to design and publish their own virtual worlds. The updates included the launch of Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), a tool that allows users to publish Unreal Engine creations directly inside Fortnite’s Creative mode, and the introduction of a new in-game economy giving in-game creators a 40 percent cut of all “Fortnite” net revenue. 

Over the past year, Epic’s updates to the Fortnite ecosystem have sparked an influx of interest from digital creators into the platform, who have brought with them both their communities and the marketing dollars of the brands looking to reach them.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Last month marked Debiedma’s tenth year as a member of Team Liquid, a Dutch esports organization that boasts a worldwide fan base. After joining the team in April 2014, he spent years as the world’s best “Super Smash Bros. Melee” player, then leaned into content creation to grow his following on Twitch to nearly 500,000. In 2021, he became a part-owner of Team Liquid after purchasing a minority stake in the company.

At the moment, Debiedma is one of the longest-tenured creators on the roster of any major esports organization. To learn why he’s stuck with Team Liquid for so long, Digiday spoke to the Twitch streamer for an annotated Q&A.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Promising signs

Marketers were quick to jump on the opportunity as gaming exploded in popularity during COVID-19 lockdown. Between 2020 and 2022, a wave of intrinsic in-game advertising companies formed with the goal of serving traditional programmatic ad formats, such as banners, within natural in-game locations such as virtual billboards and signs. 

“I don’t know that I’m bold enough to say that we have reached an inflection point, but my observation of the broader industry is that we’re getting close,” said Activision Blizzard Media vp of global business research and marketing Jonathan Stringfield. “We are seeing more brands investing in gaming; we are having less of a dialogue around ‘why games.’ We are at a point where, for a large part of the industry, we’re getting over that hill, and we are seeing agencies that have dedicated gaming specialists, or entire teams, or entire organizations.”

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

The full rollout of video ads on Roblox earlier this month represented the latest step in the company’s plan to transform its core product from a gaming hub into a full-service digital platform à la Facebook or Amazon. In the near future, Roblox will allow advertisers to programmatically purchase video ads, with the ability to target specific demographic and geographic groups across the platform’s tens of millions of daily active users.

Roblox’s foray into advertising is a potential godsend for marketers looking to reach both Gen Z and gamers at large. After all, many of Roblox’s power users are children or teens who are rapidly aging up into brands’ coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic. The company’s daily active user count of over-13 players grew by 22 percent between Q1 2023 and Q1 2024, according to figures shared by CEO Dave Baszucki during Roblox’s May 9 earnings call.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

“Our expectation is that advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us,” Wilson said during the call. “We’ll be very thoughtful as we move into that, but we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how we do thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences.”

His comment on in-game advertising during EA’s May 8 Q4 2024 earnings call was an off-the-cuff response to a question from Goldman Sachs analyst Eric Sheridan, not a prepared remark outlining a detailed strategy for the future. As such, it’s not surprising that an EA representative declined to speak further on the matter when reached for comment. Still, Wilson’s answer provided key insight into the growing urgency of standing up in-game ad offerings as the gaming industry’s traditional business models falter.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Twitch came up exactly three times during Tuesday’s upfront presentation, which was Amazon’s first-ever television upfront. Two of those times were in passing: there was a slide of celebrity presenter Keke Palmer streaming on Twitch, as well as a snippet of a Twitch stream included amid a slideshow of other Amazon properties such as “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” “Thursday Night Football” and “The Boys.”

Fleeting as it was, the latter mention provided some insight into the way Amazon is increasingly approaching Twitch as the gamer-oriented facet of its broader video content portfolio as the company looks to become more attractive to brands. Instead of meriting its own upfront presentation as an advertising platform for brands looking to reach gamers, Twitch is another piece of inventory underneath the Prime Video umbrella.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

The past month has seen a series of historic firsts for Roblox users, from the late April announcement of an e-commerce pilot test in collaboration with Walmart, to the May 1 rollout of video ads on the platform.

The platform is still growing: during its Q1 2024 earnings call last week, the company reported that its daily active user count had increased 17 percent year-over-year to nearly 78 million, with a 15 percent rise in user hours engaged during the same period. However, Roblox remains as yet unprofitable, posting a net loss of roughly $270 million for the quarter, on top of a roughly $1.2 billion loss in 2023.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Like many businesses in the space, gaming and esports talent managers flourished following the COVID-19-sparked boom in gaming activity in 2021 and 2022. This year, however, some brands’ gaming budgets have returned to pre-COVID levels, forcing talent managers to pivot to keep up, whether by helping their creators build independent businesses or by focusing on more lucrative individual deals with non-endemic brands.

To better understand how talent management in gaming and esports is shaping up in 2024, Digiday spoke to eight talent managers representing a range of companies across the industry. Here are some of the challenges they are facing — and how they hope to overcome them.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

In addition to this week’s launch in The Sandbox — a mini game named “Coach Battle,” in which players act as coaches in a fictional version of the show — The Voice has shown up across a wide range of metaverse platforms in the past year, including Decentraland, Roblox and HiberWorld. The brand’s virtual activations have ranged from dedicated, always-on metaverse experiences to sales of digital merchandise such as branded virtual hoodies and puffer jackets.

“Overall, our aim was to basically create deeper fan engagement with our audiences,” said Leila Ahmed, a brand manager for The Voice owner ITV Studios. “We know that there’s a lot of people spending more time on these types of platforms, and for us, what was really imperative and important was to engage the connection with the fans and establish a way of how we can actually connect the TV show to these types of platforms.”

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Blast launched Blast.tv in November 2022 to act as both a hub for esports data and a platform to stream the company’s “Counter-Strike” tournaments. At the moment, it’s a free service, and Blast has no immediate plans to put any part of it behind a paywall. 

Blast livestreams its events across both Blast.tv and third-party streaming platforms such as Twitch. To bring viewers into Blast.tv, Blast has loaded it up with a suite of in-depth viewing tools and regularly updated in-game data feeds, not unlike the extra features included in FACEIT Watch, the homegrown viewing channel of Blast rival ESL/FACEIT Group. Like FACEIT Watch, Blast.tv is free-to-use, not a premium, paid product. Unlike FACEIT Watch, Blast.tv does not currently include advertisements inside its livestreams.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.