Changes in the gaming industry are nothing really surprising, they happen extremely often and usually very quickly as there’s plenty of room for adjustments to be made – one of the latest has been seen within the mobile gambling industry as adjustments to payment methods and regulation such as Gamstop had been strengthened during the lockdown measures, but many operators have managed to avoid this by using sites which you can find by clicking here – perhaps the biggest news to hit major esports lately has been within League of Legends as a sponsor had been announced, and then quickly dropped in a surprising move to some.
It was recently announced that Riot Games would be partnering with Saudi Arabian project Neom as part of the European league, but was quickly met with some extremely negative feedback as many of the talent and player roster for the league quickly mentioned they didn’t agree with the pick up of this sponsor – many of the comments had been aimed at the Saudi Arabian government and their stance on the LGBTQ community given a number of individuals that are part of the scene have been very open with their stance here – on top of this the LEC had recently updated its branding in celebration of Pride as the logo had been updated to represent the pride flags.
In a very quick turnaround however, a late announcement was made that stated the LEC would be ending their partnership with the sponsor with a statement reading “As a company and as a league, we know that it’s important to recognize when we make mistakes and quickly work to correct them”, “While we missed our own expectations in this instance, we’re committed to reexamining our internal structures to ensure this doesn’t happen again” – so whilst there has been a quick adjustment to fix the change, it does seem there was some disconnect between how the decisions were made as they were very much in direct conflict.
This hasn’t been the only example recently as a number of organisations have been adjusting their sponsorships in recent months in the gaming scene – there has been a big movement recently around some scandals that have started to emerge for content creators and some big organisations within esports and have led to many big names quickly ending their partnerships as information becomes available and it tends to happen in very interesting ways too, it has often led to many making very quick decisions within hours of an announcement coming out leading to a quick tweet suggesting that the partnership is over and citing recent information as the reason why. It’s easy to forget that the esports scene is still quite young and there’s a huge learning experience still to happen as organisations may not be well versed in this line of work, but it is also refreshing to see that many will hold their hands up and admit a mistake and be willing to quickly adjust to fix that mistake too.
