The Failing Format of North America’s Biggest eSport
- hquard
- Dec 6, 2020
- 2 min read
In all the years of the League of Legends World Championship, the biggest tournament in all of eSports, teams from The North American Championship Series (LCS) have only made the semi-finals one year with mediocre at best performances compared to all the other regional leagues. This caused many fans of the LCS to conclude the league is virtually set up to fail with struggles plaguing the LCS including hardships for new organizations and teams in the league, misuse of available money, and failures creating and growing North American talent.
The LCS is struggling with getting the newer organizations to a successful level. The problem with smaller teams with smaller followings is that it will be harder to find an essential part of how eSports organizations make money: sponsorships. Steve Arhancet, the CEO of Team Liquid, says that the second biggest revenue stream of money are sponsorships gained from the amount of presence they have on social media such as YouTube. Because smaller teams do not have as large of a following as teams like Team Liquid, it can prove to be a challenge for those teams to intake money from high paying sponsorships meaning less money available to invest into the team directly causing bad performances for them as well as poor practice for good teams before international tournaments.
Along with the poor practice, there are many plausible reasons for underperformance. During an interview, European professional coach and analyst Jakob “YamatoCannon” Mebdi was asked directly about this. This is his response.
A rookie player will naturally look up to veteran players. If the culture in the LCS is that of older more experienced players just coast by doing minimal effort to collect a check, the mindset will rub off on the younger talent harming the league’s future stars. When players are paid with expectations to dominate and do the bare minimum, they are feeding into this problem.
The LCS has been making changes to improve. One of the supposed changes will be combining the amateur and Academy leagues to help foster North American talent better. This is a great step towards causing the LCS Academy to focus on younger talent but more can be done. One change that can have very positive results is setting an age or experience cap on who can play in the LCS Academy to ensure that the players in the league are fresh. Another positive change can be allowing teams to import players from smaller regions making gambles on players less risky.
With all of the struggles present, the league is in a tough spot, but this does not mean the failure of the league is inevitable. If organizations and Riot Games can look at the deeper problems of the league and work together, The League of Legends Championship Series has the possibility of not only being a huge success in the future but also can become the face of profiting American eSports leagues that many other eSports can look up to.
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