Riot Games' League of Legends pits teams of players against one another in its North American collegiate league in the hopes of securing a $100,000 (£60,000) scholarship prize. Now the company is hoping to set up a European version of the university league. But where the North American school setup lends itself to sports leagues, Europe offers up multiple languages, differing education systems and an absence of a pan-European sporting structure to contend with. Wired.co.uk spoke to Kristoffer Touborg, Riot's EU programs manager, to find out how this new League of Legends league is hoping to find its feet.
Wired.co.uk: What's the thinking behind setting up a European collegiate league?
Kristoffer Touborg: We feel there is a need for people in the university space to have a competitive framework. If you're one of the top 0.02 most talented people in the world then maybe the right competitive framework for you is to participate in the LCS (League Championship Series). If you're maybe a few steps down the ladder in terms of skill and commitment -- many of you want to play meaningful League of Legends tournaments but you still want to study to become a doctor -- then hopefully we can provide that. I'd like us to get to the end of next year and have a framework where anyone who wants to play competitive League of Legends will have a meaningful outlet.
So the university league will be very different from the prize events programme that supports private tournaments?
I think it's more of a deeper commitment because there are these gaming clubs and we're hoping people will have all these social relations. Maybe they'll get together and watch the LCS as well.
We're just creating a really diverse field of ways people can interact with competitive League of Legends.
In the US they have a pretty homogenous structure in terms of how they approach it, but we're probably going to do it differently in Europe just because there's a lot of different languages, there's a lot of different university systems, there's a lot of just different cultures. If we end up with a university league that runs differently in Germany and England, for example, I think that's fine too. We just have to create the best system for our players. Hopefully down the road we'll have something crazy like a pan-European league.
Have you been talking to gaming societies or would you put together a test framework first?
Because it's still segmented, we're going to approach the different languages and the different countries very differently.
For example, in the UK there is actually a fairly well-functioning university structure that we're talking to, but maybe in another European country where there's no structure we'll maybe want to go in and build it ourselves. Nothing's final right now.
Once we have a lot of countries going, one thing we will want is the overarching thing. Maybe we'll have local leagues hosting their cups and we'll take the winners and bring them out to a big international bash. I know that the US are doing their university finals on the LCS feed. I see no reason we wouldn't do something similar.
What kind of resources are you going to devote to it?
European university sports form one of our top three European programmes and you'll see us staff up a team this year to handle this full time. I want to do everything from supporting individual gaming clubs who register with us and sending them swag and all the stuff they need, to being hands-on in events. We actually have a kind of varsity match coming up in March and we really want to be on the ground and be there with them, but we'll announce stuff like that when it's finalised.
Are you talking to the universities themselves or just the clubs?
We're trying to build a strategy for this and map out where we're going this year, so we haven't done a lot of practical interaction but I suspect we will want. Some of the feedback we got from some of the early university [clubs] we were talking to was that they had problems getting accepted as a serious thing. So they would say, "we have a League of Legends gaming club", and some old professor in his sixties would be like, "so you don't play cricket? That doesn't work", and they would reject it. That's one of the stigmas I think we have to deal with.
We have the athlete visas through for the LCS now. In the US we're starting this university league and offering a pretty considerable amount of money in terms of scholarships. In Denmark, the leading betting company has added LCS as an option for customers to bet on. There remain some barriers in terms of mainstream acceptance that we are fighting right now and universities are one of them. There's a very mixed reception just in terms of understanding what League of Legends is and understanding that this is actually just as legit a thing as having a chess club or a rowing club.
Which university clubs have you been talking to?
We haven't actually solidified our relationships yet, so I'd prefer not to get too much into that but we'll be seeing a lot more concrete things come in at the end of Q1/start of Q2.
What can Europe learn from the US?
The US is really lucky in that university sports are a fairly mainstream and accepted part of culture. Professional sports come up through universities. It's a fundamental part of the path to being a professional in America. They have these sports clubs they can already tap into and they have really forgiving environment.
Europe is very different. I know that at my university we had a football club but it wasn't anything nearly as organised as the infrastructure they have in America. We're definitely going to approach this at a country level and we won't roll this out across Europe on day one.
What's the loose timescale looking like at the moment?
By the summer well have some less structured support for leagues and then this winter we'll aim at announcing a firm collaboration and structure.
Are there concerns regarding balancing study and gaming?
I don't think this is specific to universities. I think this is always a question that comes up in a wider context. Are people spending too much time on games? Is it healthy? I think it's a really hard question to answer, but I think my approach to this has always been that we would always prefer a healthy customer over an unhealthy one. I don't think we gain anything as a company from somebody who's in a bad spot in their lives. If I could have someone that plays League of Legends for two hours every night and gets a great education and all that stuff or I can have someone who plays for six hours and drops out, well we'll always choose the guy who has the two hours. We don't make more money if you log on for more hours or fail school. That's not what Riot's about.
The US has a $100,000 scholarship prize. Will there be a comparable prize for Europe?
For North America I think they've done a great thing. If we were to have given them a car or something that would have been odd.
Since we're in the universities, a scholarship is a great prize.
I'm not sure what we'll do for Europe, but I'd prefer it to be in the same vein.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
