Introduction: Specifically, in 2024, MSI's attractiveness to major regions and clubs will be further enhanced, and on a macro level, Riot's move also shows its attitude towards third-party competitions.
Author: Chen Wenjian.
On January 5, Riot officially looked ahead to the League of Legends esports tournament in 2024, and the most notable change for the MSI was the mid-season championship: starting in 2024, the MSI champion team will be able to qualify for the S Tournament if they make the playoffs in the following Summer Split, and the team will not be seeded regularly, and the second-best region in the MSI will also have an additional S spot.
Correspondingly, there have been some adjustments to the S quota in each region – the four regions of LEC, LCS, LCK, and LPL each have three basic World Finals spots, the PCS and VCS have two seats, and the LLA and CBOL have one place.
Going back a few years, in 2021, Riot stipulated that the MSI champion team would add an S slot in the region; In 2023, Riot has expanded its participation in MSI and revised its format, with two teams participating in MSI from each of the four regions.
Clearly, Riot's 2024 move is in line with the idea of recent years, which is intended to further strengthen the connection between MSI and the S Competition, emphasizing the importance of MSI.
The question is, there is neither a high prize of millions of dollars nor an exclusive ** to show honor, and even MSI that has been ridiculed by some viewers that three championships are not as good as one S champion, why has it repeatedly gotten "strengthening patches" from Riot in recent years?
01 Why does Riot value MSI?
Although the first League of Legends S was born in the third-party Dreamhack, Riot has since taken control of the international League of Legends esports tournament, and Riot China's head Ye Qiangsheng once said: "We recognize that third-party events have their own unique historical significance. However, most of the goals of third-party events are to promote their own event brands and obtain higher economic benefits, which conflicts with the long-term business philosophy of the League of Legends brand. ”
With Riot's years of hard work, the S tournament has indeed become the world's top esports event, but the lack of other international tournaments has always been a major weakness in the League of Legends tournament system, and the MSI in 2015 and the continental tournament in 2017 were set up by Riot to enhance international confrontation.
But back in 2021, when Riot adjusted its MSI for the first time in recent years, the MSI had just been suspended for a year due to the epidemic, and the ratings of the freshly released continental tournament were sluggish, the latter was not only inferior to the S game and MSI, but even inferior to regional leagues such as VCS, and was terminated by Riot in 2020 after three sessions. Excluding the All-Star Game, there is only one international event left in Riot's hands.
At this time, League of Legends is of course in dire need of an international event with sufficient weight, and the return of MSI after the epidemic is indeed exciting, but perhaps not enough, Riot chose to add another fire, which is also quite effective. After the return in 2021, the MSI that was able to increase the number of seats in the S competition lasted more than 61 million hours, which is second only to 2023 after the major reform of the competition system in the history of MSI, and the gap between the two is less than 1 million.
Despite this, there is still a gap between MSI and S in terms of gold content. On the one hand, after 2016, MSI's prize pool was a fixed prize of $250,000 plus 25% of the sales of the Conquest series** that year, but in 2022 and 2023 the series** was not updated, and in 2017-2019, when there was **sales disclosed, the total prize pool also slipped from nearly $2 million to $1 million, which means that MSI's hard appeal has been declining year after year.
On the other hand, compared to the large number of teams participating in the S Race, the MSI, which is limited to the champions of the Spring Race, is also a little less confrontational.
With the Continental and All-Star Games being suspended and changed, Riot has had to keep patching on the MSI without adding other events, but this year's motivation for Riot to update the MSI is slightly different from previous years.
Ahead of Riot's release of its 2024 League of Legends esports outlook, former ESPN esports reporter Jacob Wolf revealed that Riot is considering joining League of Legends to the Saudi Arabian Esports World Cup, and that the four major regions can send two teams to participate in the tournament, and Riot will not interfere with the team roster.
If you put aside the slightly inferior wild card teams, the competition intensity of the Saudi Esports World Cup is almost the same as that of MSI, and Saudi Arabia will certainly not "disadvantage" League of Legends in terms of prize money. This not only means that the Esports World Cup championship is "golden" in the eyes of the audience, but it also means that the MSI in Riot's hands is at greater risk of "depreciation".
Therefore, Riot has chosen to further tie the MSI to the highest level of League of Legends esports events, and the additional S Tournament slots have been changed from one to two, which is very powerful for the European and American regions that can occasionally break into the MSI finals or even win the championship. As a result, compared with the Saudi E-sports Cup of a similar scale, MSI will only be slightly inferior in prize money, and the status of the "main palace" is unshakable.
02 The follow-up impact of "strengthening" MSI
First of all, from the perspective of League of Legends esports and Riot esports as a whole, Riot's "strengthened" MSI sends a clear signal - I can allow international esports events to be hosted by third parties, and I can even not interfere too much in the events, but I also have to ensure that the status of my own events is not affected.
Of course, at present, Riot is only "strengthening" itself, and has not actively "weakened" the opposite side, and even Jacob Wolf's revelations show that Riot directly asked the major regions to "make way" for the Saudi Esports Cup in July. This is partly because League of Legends esports does lack other international events, and at this time, there are third-party events to fill the gap in the system, and Riot is naturally happy to see it.
But that doesn't mean Riot will embrace third-party events in its entirety.
As mentioned above, in Riot's eyes, most third-party events are designed to build their own brand and make money, and the quality of the events is not necessarily up to standard, and if something goes wrong, it is not only the third-party organizer who suffers, but also the esports project that is brought to its own esports program. For example, PGL, the organizer who often cooperated with V Society, was often criticized by players, and even fell into an eavesdropping scandal in a certain event because PGL did not have a soundproof room.
Riot accepted the Saudi E-sports Cup this time because Riot needs this piece of the puzzle, and there are Saudi tyrants who are not bad for money behind the E-sports World Cup, and the quality of the event is guaranteed.
The adjustment of MSI has also strengthened the competitiveness and fairness of the event ecology to a certain extent.
In the early years of the S competition, China, South Korea, Europe and the United States often had the same number of places, but with the change and expansion of the scale of participation, as well as the strength gap between China and South Korea and Europe and the United States, the places in the four major regions have not been the same in recent years.
This is because it is not only the MSI that will have an impact on the quota of the S competition, but also the S competition itself. For example, in 2020, Riot said that thanks to the results of LPL LEC in international competitions in the past two years, there will be four places, and LCK and LCS will have three - in 2018-2019, LPL won two S championships and one MSI championship, and LEC won one MSI championship and two S championship runners-up.
In addition, due to the impact of the epidemic, the North American region has been awarded a place in the Vietnam region for two consecutive years, and after the return of Vietnam in 2023, Riot can only let the European and American No. 4 seeds, who had poor results in the international arena in the previous two years, decide the place through the play-off.
It can be found that under the dual influence of the S competition and MSI, the participation places of the S competition in the four major regions have been a little chaotic in recent years. The adjustment of the MSI and S competitions this time gives the same basic quota to the four major regions, and the additional quota is completely determined by MSI, which is more reasonable than before.
However, the difference is that the 2024 MSI champion will receive a quota that belongs to the team itself and does not account for the seeding quota in the region, which gives the team that aspires to the championship more room for trial and error in the summer tournament in addition to the honor and value of the championship. And, as mentioned above, the second-best performing region will also receive additional spots, which will be attractive to the weaker regions as well.
Overall, the "strengthened" MSI has become more attractive to major regions and clubs, and through this year's Riot initiatives, its attitude towards third-party events can be perceived, and with the active cooperation of copyright owners and tournament owners, the audience may see more and more "big games".