Riot Games Announces “Neglect” of LPL Region
For every League of Legends tournament, organizing broadcasts along with companion programs is essential. These are necessary tools for League of Legends fans to easily follow and fully understand the tournament. Even for major global tournaments like the LPL or LCK, Riot Games has provided English commentary channels to serve global audiences alongside broadcasts in Chinese or Korean for local viewers.
However, in their latest announcement, Riot Games has clearly expressed their intention to eliminate the English commentary channel for LPL and shift the broadcasting of the tournament to co-streamers. Riot Games will provide a “Clean Feed” channel for these co-streamers so they can discuss the matches freely without being influenced by the official channel. This means that the official English commentary channel organized by Riot Games will no longer be operational.
Fans Viciously Criticize Riot Games’ Decision
Immediately after this announcement was made, it received a flood of criticism from the international League of Legends community. Even long-time commentators from the English LPL channel (HeyMunchables and Mazel) and veteran figures in the League of Legends scene like PapaSmithy criticized this decision. They believe that Riot Games’ action is simply a cost-cutting measure that does not improve the viewing experience of the LPL whatsoever.
In recent years, many prominent commentators have spoken out about Riot Games’ discrimination against the LPL region, at least in commentary roles. Many highly skilled and passionate commentators for League of Legends were not selected by Riot to participate in major tournaments like MSI or Worlds simply because they worked for the LPL channel. Some, like commentators Dagda and Hysterics, had to switch to work at LEC to have better opportunities, even though many matches at LEC have much lower quality compared to the LPL.
These discriminatory actions combined with the aforementioned announcement of “abandoning” the English LPL channel have led to even more criticism of Riot Games. Of course, from Riot Games’ perspective, they also need to cut costs during this difficult time. However, eliminating the English LPL channel in this manner will severely degrade the viewing experience for fans. Hopefully, Riot Games can find a more suitable solution in the future to avoid this dire situation.